fredcdobbs5 Well, maybe not exactly "terrible", but not very good at all. It's nicely photographed, and Yvonne Monlaur--a French actress playing a Chinese girl--is hot, but those are pretty much the film's only good points. Everything else is subpar at best. Christopher Lee tries hard as the villainous leader of the murderous Red Dragon Tong, but he is sorely miscast, as is pretty much everyone else. The Chinese characters are, with a few exceptions, played by white British actors, and not played very well. The "hero", Geoffrey Toone, is stiff, dull and unconvincing and seems to be standing around waiting to be told what to do. There are a few perfunctory and poorly done fight scenes--although there's a somewhat better brawl on the docks at the end--and the script is predictable, anemic and lifeless. Many of the characters, especially Toone's Capt. Sale, act just plain stupidly--for instance, the Tong breaks into Sale's home and murders his daughter, then later sneaks into his home again and tries to murder him, but he takes no measures to protect himself (doesn't carry a gun, doesn't ask for police protection, when he hears a knock on the door he opens it without trying to see who it is first, etc.). The pace is leaden, thanks to Anthony Bushell's uninspired direction--it was his third and last film as a director, and I can see why it was his last--and the acting ranges from over-the-top ham (especially when the British actors try doing what they think are Chinese accents) to under-the-top inept.Overall, despite a few small--VERY small--pluses, it's really not worth your time.

GusF Christopher Lee is good as Chung King but his performances in other films, both for Hammer and other films, are far better. In fact, this is one of my least favourite of his performances. It has some nice performances from Roger Delgado and Burt Kwouk (one of the few people in the film actually of Chinese descent and the only one with more than a few lines) but otherwise it's very dull. Marne Maitland, who was Indian, makes for the least convincing of the faux Chinese people but he's up against some pretty stiff competition. "The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films" said it best: "The Terror of the Tongs, perhaps thankfully a rarely-seen film, remains resolutely undistinguished in almost every department." It's only 73 minutes long, making it the shortest Hammer film that I've seen, but feels twice that. It's underwritten and the characters don't behave like real people. This is second only to "The Horror of Frankenstein" as my least favourite Hammer film, I'm afraid. This is the third and final film directed by Anthony Bushell, who had a solid career as an actor. I can't say that I'm surprised that his directing career never took off.

AaronCapenBanner Christopher Lee stars as the leader of The Red Dragon Tong, a secretive cult/business venture in 1910 Hong Kong that specializes in crime and vice. When the tong kills the daughter of a sea captain, he vows revenge, becoming determined to take it down by any and all means possible, but the Tong isn't so easily defeated or intimidated, and begins a retaliatory campaign against him, costing many lives. Future "Doctor Who" star(as the Master) Roger Delgado costars as a ruthless Tong enforcer. Nicely filmed in color, but Christopher Lee is miscast as an Asian(!) A fine performance, but makeup is unconvincing, and film ultimately too routine and predictable to succeed.

john-1952 To enjoy this movie you must ignore that most of the 'Chinese' are played by obviously English actors. That was how it was done back then. Hammer worked with limited budgets but almost always came up with suspenseful and colourful movies.Christopher Lee plays his role with his usual aplomb, whilst the rest of the cast made up of many familiar faces keeps the movie rolling along.I first saw this movie over thirty years ago and it took me quite a while to track down a copy on VHS but to this day I still enjoy it immensely. Don't regard it as a piece of art. It's an adventure film in the same vein as Big Trouble in Little China, done very well for the small money and time they had to make it.