San Francisco: Someone is committing a series of freakish murders, and famed detectivee Charlie Chan's (Peter Ustinov) klutzy grandson Lee (Richard Hatch) feels obliged to investigate, much to the dismay of his grandmother Mrs Lupwitz (Lee Grant), whose husband's murder Charlie solved decade ago - though not without creating a scandal concerning hubby's sexual relationship with his later murderer Dragon Queen (Angie Dickinson). Since Lee's wedding to Cordelia (Michelle Pfeiffer) is only days away, Charlie Chan comes to San Francisco to attend - and police inspector Baxter (Brian Keith) asks Chan to work on the freak murder case pretty much right away. Besides that, the Dragon Queen has been released from prison and makes attempt after attempt on Charlie's life.

This though is only the set-up, what follows are a few murders and chases and the like before Lee and Cordelia are kidnapped right before their wedding but saved by Charlie, who oon enough has the police arrest the Dragon Queen, but then reveals the person who committed the murders to be Mrs Lupowitz, who did it to have her revenge on Charlie for creating a scandal when solving her husband's murder, and she thought it best to commit the perfect crime to this end. She failed.

Roddy McDowall can be seen as Mrs Lupowitz' wheelchair-bound butler, Rachel Roberts as her paranoid maid.

A trainwreck of a movie. Apparently this was intended to be a spoof of the Charlie Chan series of old or at least a comedy based on the series' characters. Unfortunately though, the film fails miserably because it simply isn't funny: The script tries so hard to cram in bad old joke after bad old joke it's almost pathetic, and Clive Donner's directorial effort so sadly lacks comic timing it's surprising he ever was allowed to make another movie - every Charlie Chan movie of old written by some hack writers, directed by some third-rate filmaker is funnier, actually, a lot funnier. On top of that, the slapstick sequences al seem unnecessarily cheaply made. And how a pretty decent cast did get suckered into this is beyond my comprehension, above everybody else Peter Ustinov, back then already a director of quite some repute and respectability - but his rendition of a Chinaman isn't even good, not living up to Warner Oland, Sidney Toler or even Roland Winters.

Complete waste of time.

review � by Mike Haberfelner

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