CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER

 

Produced and directed by low-budget exploitation maven Albert Zugsmith, this 1961 potboiler contains one of Vincent Price's most unusual roles (and that's saying a lot). Set in late 19th Century San Francisco, CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER has Price as Gilbert de Quincey, a soldier of fortune who infiltrates the powerful Tong criminal empire to put an end to a smuggling ring that provides various young Asian women to be sold as slaves. 

The movie is in black & white, and at times it feels like an episode of THE WILD WILD WEST (though not as fun or entertaining). San Francisco's Chinatown is represented by a generic-looking backlot, while the action scenes are very underwhelming. It doesn't help that Vincent Price is totally miscast as a rugged adventurer--one would expect Price to be leading a group of human traffickers instead of fighting them. 

It appears that Albert Zugsmith assumed putting Price, who was already associated with the weird and the macabre, in a feature with such a notorious title would attract some attention. It also appears that Zugsmith put the film together as if it was an opium-fueled vision. The plot is confusing, the visuals are overly strange, and Price gets plenty of chances to intone some doom-laden Edgar Allan Poe-style voice-overs. The florid dialogue is filled with plenty of Charlie Chan-like aphorisms. Despite all the lurid intentions, CONFESSIONS winds up being nothing more than a big tease. If this film had been made about a decade later, with someone like Jess Franco at the helm, it probably wouldn't have been any better....but at least it would have been more interesting. 

Albert Glasser provides a wild music score that goes off in about a dozen different directions, and Angelo Rossitto has a cameo as a newspaper vendor (which is what he was when he wasn't acting), but there isn't much else that makes CONFESSIONS notable. The Tong organization that Price's character is battling is another one of those supposedly powerful criminal groups that gets overcome rather easily. Vincent Price fans might want to see this, just to see how he fares in such an atypical role, but it's quite noticeable that the actor is uncomfortable in it. CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER is available on the Tubi streaming channel, but it is listed under the title SOULS FOR SALE.