Lugosi handles all this nonsense with a surprising level of commitment. Perhaps the relative novelty of playing the good guy was a major motivator. As a practitioner of the mystic arts, though, Chandu is pretty unimpressive. "What can you do against all these madmen?" a character asks at one point in the action. "I can do much," Chandu responds vaguely.
We see him turn invisible for a time and zap the temple when it comes time to rescue the princess, but his primary shtick is to speak to his yogi mentor somewhere across the sea - a feat which is suggested by having Lugosi stare into space as an unseen actor speaks to him off-camera away from the mic. Fortunately for our princess in peril, the Lemurians prove inept even by movie serial standards. They don't even notice when one of the good guys switches Nadji's unconscious body with that of the dead priestess, tossing the wrong bod into the sacrificial fire as a result. Maybe this dumb deception worked on radio, but it sure doesn't pass muster on a darkened black-and-white film.
Still, Lugosi lovers will doubtless get a kick out of this film, if only for the chance to watch the man get put through his action serial paces: dropping through a trap door into a pit with a tiger, getting tied down as a giant boulder slowwwwly drops down (hey, if he's such a bigshot magician, why can't he Houdini his way out of a few knots?), wandering through an "inescapable" dark and spooky labyrinth. If the Chandu Experience doesn't prove very Monsterfestive, it still provides some good Saturday a.m. fun - and is much less depressing than a lot of the Z-level monster flicks that the worn-out actor made near the end of his career. Doing much, I guess, is no small feat, after all.
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