Review of Kiss and Kill (1967) by Senor C — 24 Mar 2011

The fourth of a five film series based on Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories. This one was made by Spanish director Jess Franco. Even though the Fu Manchu films were crime stories, this one dips into the horror genre with disasterous results, while it's star is hardly anywhere to be seen for most of the time.

This has Oriental criminal mastermind Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee) plotting to take over the world once again. He's hiding out in the Amazonian jungles of South America, and has found snakes that carry a deadly poison in a lost underground city.

Fu Manchu's plan involves using the snakes to bite into women, and they will carry the poison. When they kiss a man, it causes the man to go blind, followed 6 weeks later by death. Fu Manchu manipulates kidnapped women to be the carries of the poison, and go out into the world and carry out these killings, One of the women (Shirley Eaton) ends up in London and passes on the poison to Scotland Yard detective Nayland Smith (Richard Greene), Fu Manchu's arch-nemesis.

Despite Smith going blind, he decides to venture out into the jungle to find an antidote and put a stop to Fu Manchu's evil scheme. It's not very well made, and despite the exotic locations, is made on the cheap, and director Franco has done better films than this.

It's badly edited, badly dubbed and Christopher Lee only appears to plot and scheme for a few minutes of screentime.