The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

directed by Roy Ward Baker / Chang Cheh

UK/Hong Kong

83 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I don't know how I made it so long without being aware that there existed a Hammer/Shaw Brothers co-production. Of course my immediate thought upon finding this out was "in what universe could that not be fantastic?" I was warned by other reviewers, however, that 7 Golden Vampires couldn't possibly live up to your expectations of it as a fan of either of those two studios, but I had to check it out anyway, and honestly? This kind of is fantastic. It's just also a little bit bad.

There's something that I genuinely love about the concept of this, and it's really a shame that Hammer never did anything else in this vein and that this movie seems to largely have been shelved and only known about by people who actively seek it out. Having familiar characters venture into other countries isn't uncommon ground for horror franchises that hit critical sequel mass - there'll sometimes be hokey films or episodes in which our heroes find themselves dealing with another culture's horror icons, but typically those installments are dealt with with less input from whatever locale they're visiting than is the case with 7 Golden Vampires. Not that this one isn't hokey as well, but the balance between Hammer and Shaw Brothers feels equal, and even breaks some stereotypes. Usually it's China who gets shoehorned into being the place with mythology and legend woven deep into its culture, and its people are assumed to be overly superstitious and mystical, but when Van Helsing tries to convince a room full of students that a vampire legend exists in their midst, the students' reaction is pretty uniformly "get the hell out of here with your European nonsense".

Fortunately, though, one guy has insider knowledge of this whole vampire business. David Chiang plays our lead from the Shaw Brothers side, and good thing he has a whole shedload of brothers (and one sister) who happen to know martial arts and are willing to defend Van Helsing, his boring-ass son, and some random rich lady as they investigate the vampires plaguing the brothers' hometown. I genuinely liked Chiang - apparently quite famous in wuxia and other movies from Hong Kong and China, there's just something about him that made him pleasant to watch even when he was not fighting, which is somewhat of a rarity; you don't usually find an actor who can do both. I just thought he had a lovely accent, I liked listening to him talk. But anyway, the rest of his brothers don't have a lot of impact on the plot other than as a magnet to attract big fight scenes to the main cast of characters were there otherwise might be none. They get to the town and it's predictably absolutely lousy with vampires, headed up by Kah, who is possessed by the evil spirit of the OG European Dracula.

This movie is noticeably more gory and contains more nudity than a lot of Hammer films; at least the earlier ones, anyway, they were getting pretty randy in the '70s. But the one big difference between this and the core Dracula series that spawned it is that there are a great many vampires in 7 Golden Vampires, whereas in Dracula, you just have the one head honcho and maybe a couple of young women he's turned, who generally always get killed along the way. 7 Golden Vampires is swarming with them, just crawling with vamps, rendering the concept of a vampire into something more similar to what the West might term a zombie. Each of them has some pretty gnarly makeup on, looking as gross and rotten as is possible, and they really just don't stop coming - the title references a select group of seven, obviously, but the fighting brothers' town is overwhelmed by their servants as well. I enjoyed seeing more gore and practical effects makeup than Hammer usually has on offer, even if it wasn't that great by technical standards. I'm specifically a big fan of that effect you see a lot in vampire movies where the vampire gets staked and they do a time-lapse shot of their body crumbling into dust, and there's a whole lot of that in this movie. When the head vamp finally gets served, we see the spear used to do the deed fall over and crack open his skull once he reaches the stage of crumbliness where the spear is no longer kept upright by being lodged in his flesh. I liked that. It's the little things.

So, yeah, I don't know what most people were expecting from this, but personally I was pretty satisfied because I went into it knowing it wasn't going to be a """genuinely""" good film. When you think about it, Hammer and Shaw Brothers are both studios where, after watching a certain amount of films from them, you know just about where to set your expectations: Hammer consistently gives out movies with much the same tone, especially the early ones; you learn to anticipate that kind of cheesy fake sound-stage Bavaria and historical inaccuracy, and with Shaw Brothers you know you can't expect knockout acting and intense, heartstring-tugging drama. So as long as you have some familiarity with everyone involved, I don't see why one can't enjoy The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires as much as one might expect to. It's certainly never boring.