Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) – A. Zugsmith

Vincent Price plays the early 20^th century descendent of 17^th century author Thomas De Quincey (who is famous for writing about his experience of opium addiction), newly arrived in San Francisco’s Chinatown but already familiar with the Tongs and their warfare.  He meets a captive woman, abducted from China and about to be sold as a “foreign bride” (i.e., he discovers a human trafficking syndicate), and he determines to free her.  That’s the bare bones of the plot but the treatment of this subject matter (by producer turned exploitation director Albert Zugsmith) is seriously loopy.  For one thing, we start aboard a Chinese junk where Asian women (actually played by Asian women) are being thrown into a net, soon to be hoisted into the air and dumped unceremoniously on a smaller ship, headed for the shore.  When they arrive, the seafarers engage in hand-to-hand combat with a small group waiting for them on the shore.  This turns out to be a useful scene because we are shown a key figure (George Wah) being killed – it turns out that he was a newspaper editor working hard to stop the slave trade.  With his death, his enemies (led by Linda Ho) have free rein to keep up the trafficking – until Price wanders in.  The film is crazy with bizarre camera angles, over-the-top art direction featuring lots of Chinese masks, screens, and artworks, and a bizarre opium-induced slow-motion escape/battle scene.  Of course, the slave women are forced to do exotic dances (exploitation but tame). Despite the well-paced weirdness, there is a general unseemliness to this affair, given its sordid and shocking topic, and the racist overtones that are hard to ignore.  Even Price must have been wondering how he wound up here! But still, it’s worth a look for some sheer insanity that somehow never quite falls apart.