This film is part of Free

The Fungi Cellars

In one of his most fiendish schemes yet, the dastardly Dr Fu-Manchu entombs his pursuers in an underground chamber full of deadly giant mould spores

Action and Adventure 1923 27 mins Silent

Overview

Fu-Manchu’s slave girl Karamaneh leads sleuths Nayland Smith and Dr Petrie to her evil master’s lair, where they fall prey to another of the Devil Doctor’s traps. Bound hand and foot, they watch helplessly as a party of policemen are imprisoned in a subterranean vault and poisoned with vile fungal spore vapour, while Fu-Manchu cackles with maniacal glee. Can our heroes escape to save the day?

Dr Fu-Manchu, equipped with "every resource of modern science at his command" and inordinately obsessed with world domination, is an early example of the kind of absurdly larger-than-life super-villain that would populate a plethora of low-budget cliff-hanger serials made across the Atlantic in decades to come. And the Devil Doctor would go on to feature in one himself: Republic Pictures' The Drums of Fu-Manchu (1940).