Movie Review – The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires

Tweet

1974 – Spoiler alerts A year after Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon sparked a martial arts craze, the now struggling Hammer Studios in Britain decided to draw together the Western Gothic Horror franchise, and the Oriental martial arts movie genre in a very peculiar mish-mash that actually proves to be quite entertaining, except surprisingly when the Chinese elements are absent. Filmed and backed by Hong Kong based martial arts movies studio The Shaw Brothers, Hammer desperately wanted their own Count Dracula figure involved in the action, though he has little to do outside the prologue and epilogue. Worse, he is not played by Christopher Lee, but by a lame impersonator, John Forbes Robertson, and voiced with extremely bad lip syncing by David De Keyser. The Dracula franchise’s other leading figure, Van Helsing, is mercifully played as ever by Peter Cushing, who is drawn as a vampire expert, into investigating the re-emergence of the 7 Vampires of the title. However, Helsing, his son (played by Bless This House comedy actor, Robin Stewart) and a glamorous rich adventuress (Julie Ege) are given little to do beside the Chinese heroes, a band of eight martial arts skilled vampire hunters; all related (seven brothers, one sister). The plot follows the lines of The Magnificent Seven (and Seven Samurai). One of the seven vampires is already dead, having been killed by the family’s grandfather before he himself died, so it is now eleven against six, seven if you count the Count, but he does absolutely nothing. The vampires can raise an army of zombies, with scenes that are genuinely impressive as is the Martial arts choreography in big fight scenes). The zombie hordes move in a variety of ways, including hopping, and sound like they are on badly oiled furniture castors. The death of Julie Ege and the Chinese brother she loves despite only just meeting, is genuinely touching. She has been vampirized and bites him, only for him to stake both her and himself in a strange hara-kiri mutual suicide final hurrah. The climactic weakness lies again with Dracula. As the last of the Seven Golden Vampires is impressively despatched, the Count steps out of the shadows as in pantomime to have a last angry short fight with Helsing, from which all the other surviving heroes (two brothers, the sister and Helsing Junior) are absent. This is an entirely non-oriental Gothic struggle that looks as if it strayed in from another movie – this film would work without any Dracula references at all. Still highly entertaining and possibly an influence on Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series as well as Buffy The Vampire Slayer too. Arthur Chappell