Grade: D+
Synopsis: A British sea captain (Geoffrey Toone) tries to bring down a Hong-Kong crime syndicate.
The Terror of the Tongs is a stagnant gangster-thriller from Hammer Film Productions. The story is similar to Hammer’s earlier effort, The Stranglers of Bombay (1960); a secret society terrorizes the locals under the nose of the foreign occupiers, who only sit up and take notice once things get personal. One big difference was that The Stranglers of Bombay, set in India, had actors that could actually pass for Indian in key roles, where as The Terror of the Tongs, set in Hong-Kong is an almost all-European cast made up to look slant-eyed.
There are other problems. For starters, aside from a notable early plot twist involving a surprising murder, the script by Jimmy Sangster is slow and lacks any sense of urgency. Even at only 80 minutes, the film crawls for much of the second half, which only magnifies the fact that lead Geoffrey Toone can’t carry the film. He’s not bad, per-se, but he lacks the presence necessary to distract you from the low-budget production and carry you over the film’s lulls.
Of course, the bad makeup jobs don’t help matters much. The most amusing of these is Christopher Lee, who has nothing to work with character wise, but manages to hold your interest through sheer charisma as an unusually tall, and oddly unaccented, Chinese gang-lord. Thus, in the end, The Terror of the Tongs might be worth a look for Lee fans, if only for the novelty, but others would be better served watching The Stranglers of Bombay (1960) instead.
