'THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU'.....SELLERS' FAREWELL, DAME HELEN AS YOU'VE NEVER SEEN HER.....

The Fiendish Plot Of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980)    I'll not dwell too much on the details of this terrible, unfunny and generally pathetic movie......... the last film appearance of cinema comedy icon Peter Sellers, who finally (and fatally) succumbed to a lifetime of heart disease not long after its release. 

            Sellers, who spends most the film heavily made up as the famous pulp villain Fu Manchu, already looks and sounds exhausted and ill. His legendary mercurial and toxic temperament led him to fire the director of this lame, desperate farce and direct it himself.

            He did himself no favors and the script did him no favors, a worn out collection of tired gags strung together to service a dumb storyline. It's like a bad Saturday Night Live 3 minute sketch stretched out over 100 very very long minutes.

           (And in our current day and age, it's hard to watch it without wincing, since the foul racist slur for Chinese people gets freely thrown in, making the film even more embarrassingly awful...)

            Fu's elixir that fuels his eternal life gets accidentally dropped by a clumsy minion....played, in a surprise meta gag, by Burt Kwouk, renowned for his role as Sellers kung fu butler Kato in the "Pink Panther" movies. 

           So the evil genius has no choice but to engineer thefts of precious diamonds in Washington and London, since he needs to grind up the gems as the secret ingredients for a new batch of elixir. 

           Hot on Fu's trail comes Scotland Yard inspector Avery (David Tomlinson of "Mary Poppins").The 'Yard also recruits Fu's longtime nemesis, Sir Dennis Nayland Smith (also Sellers) and FBI agent Joe Capone (Sid Caesar outfitted like he's playing a gangster in one of his old TV show skits.)

            This sad train wreck of movie came close to putting me to sleep until it sprung another member of the crime fighting team, young police constable Alice Rage (Helen Mirren, still decades away from her 'Damehood). Signed up as decoy to entrap Fu Manchu, Alice first auditions for the job, warbling "On The Good Ship Lollipop" while dressed in a thy skirt. 

          Really.

           And she plays a mean saxophone. No kidding. Not making this up. 

           Should you ever come across the film (not that we'd ever advise anyone to actively seek it out), stick around at least for Dame Helen's song and dance numbers. Sequences you're likely to never forget.

          And the rest of "Fu Manchu"?  Change the channel. Quick. It's a 1 star (*) ordeal to sit through.