All Rise...

Judge Jim Thomas has learned how to train his circus dragon.

Editor's Note

Our review of The Christopher Lee Collection, published November 6th, 2003, is also available.

The Charge

The most horrifying syndicate of evil in history!

The Case

Maybe someone at Blue Underground was flipping through a catalog and said, "Oh hey, Christopher Lee and Klaus Kinski made a couple of movies together—that'd be an interesting double bill!" Or maybe they were just tripping balls. In any event, Blue underground brings us Circus of Fear / Five Golden Dragons (Blu-ray), though I'm at a loss as to why. Oh, that's right: Both movies were based on novels by Edgar Wallace, one of the more ridiculously prolific writers of the early 20th Century. Over the course of twenty-five years he wrote over 130 novels, 30 plays, along with a bunch of short stories and nonfiction. If you look up "quantity, not quality" in a dictionary, you might see a picture of Wallace.

Both of these movies were written and produced by Harry Alan Towers. Yeah, I'd never heard from him before, either. He's mainly known for his collaborations with director Jess Franco.

Circus of Fear
After a daring armored car robbery, the surviving gang member seeks refuge in a traveling circus where the mastermind behind the robbery resides incognito. Scotland Yard dispatches Detective Eliot (Leo Genn, 55 Days at Peking) to smoke out the miscreant. Eliot quickly discovers that the circus harbors all manner of intrigue, including a quick-tempered knife thrower, a dwarf secretly blackmailing other performers, and a lion tamer (Christopher Lee, Horror of Dracula) who constantly wears a mask to cover the scars of a previous lion attack. No sooner does Eliot arrive than people start turning up dead, killed with throwing knives. And who's that weirdo (Klaus Kinski, Nosferatu) skulking around?

Part of the problem with the movie is that between the lurid cover art, the title, the presence of Lee (in a mask), and Kinski (not in a mask, but his face is creepy enough on its own), you go into the movie kind of expecting some kind of horror movie. The US title, Psycho Circus only makes matters worse (The Wallace source novel was Three Just Men). But at heart, it's a nice little detective thriller, and at the end, Eliot brings together the cast (the surviving ones, at least), and susses out the killer. Agatha Christie didn't lose any sleep over the competition, but it's a decent enough yarn, with some memorable characters, decent performances all around, and fairly strong direction from John Llewellyn Moxey, whose directorial credits include Kolchak: The Night Stalker, as well as multiple episodes of Magnum P.I. and Murder, She Wrote. And that's what you have here—an enjoyable movie, nothing more, nothing less.

The restored video is much better than it has any right to be. I mean, really—it's GREAT, a far cry from what you'd expect from a low budget movie made 50 years ago. We've got a new 2k master made from the original British negative, restoring 22 minutes of footage that had been trimmed for the American release (not sure what the restored footage was, but with a relatively taut 91 minute running time, I'm pretty sure the American release was missing some important scenes). Crisp detail, strong color saturation—it probably looks better than it did when it was originally released. The DTS-HD Mono track doesn't fare nearly as well, suffering from some serious balance issues. The dialog, sound effects, and score aren't mixed evenly—the sound effects are jacked up to 11 and often drown out dialog. It's something of a mystery why Blue underground would but that kind of effort into the remastered video and not make at least a token effort to remaster the audio. The extras include trailers and a poster/still gallery, along with a fairly fun commentary with director Moxley.

Five Golden Dragons
We're not nearly as lucky with the second movie on the double bill. Five Golden Dragons has American playboy Bob Mitchell (Bob Cummings, Dial M for Murder) on vacation in Hong Kong when he gets swept up into criminal intrigue, as though he were a faux Cary Grant in an extraordinarily poorly-written Hitchcock knockoff (imagine Hitchcock re-written by PDQ Bach. Or Uwe Boll). After a tepid assortment of quasi-farcical chases, we get to the heart of the matter: The Five Dragons, secretive leaders of the Hong Kong underworld, are selling their Interests to the Mafia for a cool $50 million. Four of the dragons are well known to the police—Christopher Lee, Dan Duryea (The Flight of the Phoenix), Brian Donleavy (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), and George Raft (Some Like It Hot), who for some reason wear silly dragon masks to their meetings even though everyone knows who they are.

The whole thing makes the bear outfits worn by Sean Connery and his cabal in the ghastly The Avengers look good by comparison. The identity of the fifth Dragon is a mystery to all, but by the time you get there, my dears, you won't give a damn. It's an interesting idea, but there isn't a shred of originality to be found (or coherence, for that matter), and I'm pretty sure that most of the actors were on Valium. Cummings is downright annoying at times. The one bright spot in the proceedings is the rapport between Police Commissioner Sanders (Rupert Davies, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold) and Inspector Chiao (Roy Chiao, Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom), who quote Shakespeare back and forth as they try to sort of the tangled web than men weave. Apart from those two, though, blech. Christopher Lee (and the other Dragons) has maybe five minutes of screen time, and Klaus Kinski chain smokes his way through his minor role as an enforcer.

The technical side is fairly similar to Circus of Fear—GREAT video, new 2k master, etc; middling audio track. If there's a weakness to the video, it's that every detail of those goofy dragon masks will be seared into your cerebral cortex. The only extras for this one are the theatrical trailer and a gallery of posters and stills.

Depending on the price, the disc is worth a modest price just for Circus of Fear.

The Verdict

Not guilty.

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