| abstract
| - "Kool Fu Mo Gee"'s got a device/weapon/thingy that, far away, in tropical waters creates an iceberg and makes an ocean liner run into it. You see, Fu has captured one "Professor Heracles" inventor of a super weapon - crystals made from opium that can, depending on plot requirements, render people unconscious and/or turn the entire ocean into ice. Yes. Fu broadcasts his demands to the world. Scotland Yard intercepts the message and puts agent Nayland Smith (the very bland and doughy Richard Greene) on the case. Smith opines that Fu must be stopped or "mankind will be obliterated". Really? To get opium, Fu prepares to capture the governor's mansion in Istanbul, where there is a huge supply. He joins forces with drug kingpin Omar Pashu after sending daughter Lin to arrange the deal. Their men storm the castle and behead the governor. Fu then double crosses Pashu by machine-gunning his men and taking his Russian "girlfriend-who-fights-like-man" "Lisa" hostage. Meanwhile, Professor Heracles lies abed afflicted with what appears to be congestive heart failure, sweating under a polychromatic light show caused by bad film processing. He's dying, but hasn't surrendered the formula for the crystals, so he must be kept alive a while longer. Fu decides to get Heracles a new heart, so he procures a donor and kidnaps Heracle's doctors Kestler and Ingrid to do the transplant. Fu commands Kestler do the transplant or Ingrid will die. To show he means business, he causes a dam located in another movie right next door to his castle to collapse, and he makes Kestler watch. Kestler submits. Luckily the mansion either came with what is supposed to be a fully supplied operating room, or Fu had it built in the half hour he has occupied the castle. The operation begins. This heart transplant is performed by just two people - Dr. Kestler, with Dr. Ingrid assisting. The operating field is illuminated by a single ordinary overhead lamp purchased at Wal-mart. They use only liquid ether as anesthetic. There is no intubation to support respiration, no administration of intravenous fluids, no heart-lung bypass machine, no electronic blood pressure or other monitor and no device to start the new organ. They open the chest with a screwdriver and a small hammer and use hemostats to hold the chest cavity open. Heracles' diseased heart is the size of a large prune. Remarkably, the doctors do not get one drop of blood on their scrubs during the operation. In every other aspect the procedure is chillingly realistic. Operation over, the doctors are then confined to a dungeon. Omar Pashu goes to Fu's castle to rescue Lisa where Lin dispatches him with a knitting needle (she clearly enjoys her work), but not before Fu reveals his grandiose escape plan, complete with the "Entrance to Eternity" - a tunnel with a mechanism for releasing Fu's water-freezing weapon. You must be this tall to enter the Entrance to Eternity. Agent Smith swims up to the castle and races up the stairs and down to the dungeon. Breaking into the control room, he signals London to send a warning to the Bosporus (which Fu has threatened to freeze), whereupon Fu releases the crystals and torrents of water into the escape tunnel. The water does not freeze solid, for some reason. Exhibit under repair. Kestler blows open his cell door with "explosive acid" he found in the operating room (along with a piece of string and a picture of Eve Arden). Smith storms the dungeon, liberating Lisa, and together the two of them seize Heracles and drag him out the front door. Although his chest was cracked open and a new heart sewn into place just a few hours ago, he does not wince as he is being manhandled, nor does he tear open all of his stitches and bleed out on the spot. Doctors Kestler and Ingrid race out the escape passage. Lisa runs back inside the tunnel to rescue the now-dead Pashu and is drowned in one foot of water as ivory-soap-bar-like crystals float sadly about. Somehow Fu's weapon "system" is "reversed" (I suspect polarity may have been involved), blowing up the castle with multiple, sequential, widely separated but picturesque small explosions. Fu's face dimly registers "dull surprise" as the castle crumbles around him. He leaves us with a voice-over warning that he'll be back. He was wrong. This was the last Fu Manchu / Christopher Lee film. Widely considered one of the more "difficult" movies taken on by the Brains.
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