circus of fear

Say what you will about producer Harry Alan Towers (various reports claim him to be a high-class pimp, a Soviet spy or both!), the man knew how to sell a movie in the international marketplace: exotic locales, a little skin, sketchy literary pedigree and a few over-the-hill stars to pad the credits. With formula in hand he churned out a huge amount of second-tier adventure stories throughout the '60s with enough cross-cultural appeal that they could play almost anywhere...and still play quite well on home video, as a matter of fact.

Circus of Fear is based on a mystery by Edgar Wallace, the British crime novelist whose name almost became a genre unto itself, particularly in Germany; eventually influencing the burgeoning giallo boom in Italy. The disparate plot threads (an armored car robbery, various love triangles and oaths of family vengeance) come together at the winter quarters of a traveling circus, where a murderer hides among the quirky employees. Is it the blackmailing dwarf? The upstanding ringmaster? The hotheaded knife thrower? Or perhaps the masked lion tamer (Christopher Lee), whose face is hidden for the majority of the film’s running time.

Director John Moxey piques our interest with the opening heist on London's Tower Bridge (impressively shot on-location) then the plot settles into a Ten Little Indians approach, throwing in a relatively blood-free death every 15-minutes or so. Circus of Fear is a workmanlike thriller blessed with an above-average cast of suspects, including the aforementioned Lee, future giallo star Suzy Kendall and actor/provocateur Klaus Kinski in one of his first English speaking roles.

Five Golden Dragons, on the other hand, is just odd from the word go, starting with leading man, Bob Cummings, whose manic, gum smacking, performance is like Jimmy Stewart buried in a faceful of cocaine. Having popped up in a few Hitchcock movies, Cummings probably seemed like the perfect choice to play clueless tourist Bob Mitchell, whose Hong Kong vacation is interrupted by a beautiful woman on the run from a clandestine criminal organization manipulating the world's gold supply. But he's at least ten years too old to play a romantic lead, and the actor's rapid-fire adlibs and self-deprecating humor is a poor match for the material.

Not that the rest of director Jeremy Summer's film is all that hot. Five Golden Dragons seems to have all the right pieces in place - chase scenes, torture scenes, waterskiing abduction scenes - but moves at a glacial pace. It's cast of famous faces (Lee and Kinski pop up again, as does George Raft and Brian Donlevy) give the third act a boost, but film's comedic approach is too scattershot, lacking the kitchsy, sexy charm of Tower's Sumuru and Fu Manchu films (also available from Blue Underground).

Paired up on a cost-effective Blu-ray double feature, both films look good enough to give the most jaded home theater enthusiast a double take. Circus of Fear in particular just glows with the kind of transfer that tops some of BU's best work. The extras - audio commentary, trailers and still gallery - are ported over from the previous DVD edition, which was part of their Christopher Lee Collection.