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The
Legend Of The
7 Golden Vampires
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5
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7 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Undead
kung fu action!
A co-production of Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers
and Britain's Hammer Films, Legend Of
The 7 Golden Vampires is an exotic excursion into the
patently absurd. Hammer, the company that had revitalized gothic
horror in cinema —
making international stars of Peter Cushing and Christopher
Lee —
was, by the early 1970s, on its last legs. Thanks to Bruce Lee
martial arts films were very popular at the time, so someone
got the bright idea of making a kung fu Dracula movie. It's
every bit as silly as it sounds.
In 1904 Dracula's arch-nemesis Professor
Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) unknowingly discovers the vampire
king in rural China, where Drac has taken on the visage of an
undead Chinese warlord, the evil, ambitious Ka (Shen Chan).
Aided by his son Leyland (Robin Stewart), a sexy Swedish adventuress
(Julie Ege) and a family of kung fu warriors, Van Helsing gives
battle to Dracula and his legion of hopping vampire-ghouls for
possession of the cursed village of Ping Kuei. In the process,
much ridiculous dialog and karate/kung fu combat ensues.
It's as if screenwriter Don Houghton took
a Hammer Dracula and a Hong Kong fu flick and simply tossed
'em in a blender. The script is just dreadful. There are some
real eye-rollers amongst the dialog, many spoken by Count Dracula.
Though played onscreen by The Vampire
Lovers' John Forbes-Robertson, Drac's speech is dubbed
by a voice actor whose velvet baritone only makes the comic
book villain-style lines sound even more ridiculous. It doesn't
help matters that, in Dracula's first dramatic appearance during
the pre-titles sequence, Forbes-Robertson sports the worst vampire
makeup in Hammer history... A nice homage to F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu
— the Count rises to a standing position within his open sarcophagus
— is
instantly trashed with the movie's first close-up shot of the
Lord of the Undead. Dracula looks like he's been slurping cherry
Kool-Aid straight from the pitcher. Or even worse, an aged drag
queen who's lost his wig. (Not an auspicious way to begin
a horror film.) The rest of the makeup effects don't fare much
better. The titular golden vampires, undead warriors who serve
and protect Ka (and later Dracula), resemble really wrinkly
guys with fish eyes wearing gold Mardi Gras masks. Dracula again
comes a cropper at film's end, where at one moment during his
death scene he looks like a pan of linguine exploded in his
face.
So much for the laughable makeup. There's
plenty more to disparage... The woefully poor matte shot of
Castle Dracula, for one. The extremely fake-looking rubber bats.
(Nothing new about that.) Composer James Bernard's previous
scores for Hammer had often been somewhat strident —
when not
bombastic —
but here
his reworking of familiar Dracula themes with Oriental motifs
is just downright annoying. (After awhile it becomes
akin to an uncomfortable itch that just won't go way.)
Keeping with the tradition of the previous two entries in Hammer's
Dracula series, Dracula A.D. 1972
and The Satanic Rites Of Dracula,
the final confrontation between Van Helsing and the Count is
the very definition of anticlimactic. Dracula proves remarkably
easy to kill.
But all is not lost. Played completely straight,
the sheer absurdity of the movie actually saves it. Directed
in workmanlike fashion by Roy Ward Baker (Dr.
Jekyll And Sister Hyde), the pace is certainly brisk and
there's a lot of "Old Style" chop socky action. (This
was long before the days of such "Wire Fu" inspired
horror/martial arts hybrids as Blade.)
The plentiful kung fu battles pit the intrepid Hsi family against
the henchmen of a Chunking gangster as well as Dracula's ghoul
army, who emerge from their graves and gambol about like Trick
or Treaters in Tombs Of The Blind Dead-style
slow motion. Cushing, always a pro, keeps things together with
his typically commanding performance. The film's still a cheesy
mess but his presence adds considerable gravitas. Then past
60, Cushing even gets involved in some of the action sequences,
obviously performing a number of his own stunts. (To include
stumbling and falling into a real campfire. He's certainly quite
spry in this scene!) I hope he received a big check for this.
Truly the weirdest Hammer vampire movie ever
made.
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Anchor
Bay's 1998 DVD release of this Hammer oddity is a package that
should please most fans. Visual quality of the nearly pristine
2.35:1 letterbox transfer is quite good. The Digital Mono audio
track is generally strong, particularly in regards to the music
and sound effects, though a few fleeting bits of dialog seem a
bit muffled. When combined with a thick Chinese or Scandinavian
accent this can be problematic.
The Extras provided are slim in number but nonetheless
substantial. The most unusual of these is a 45-minute audio recording
narrated by the uncredited Dracula voice-actor (see above) and
Peter Cushing. It essentially tells the story of the entire movie,
complete with musical scoring and sound effects from the film
cleverly edited in. With their distinct voices and precise enunciation,
these gentlemen render the tale more entertaining (and significantly
less silly) in "storybook" form than it is as a motion
picture. It really would've been cool had this recording been
put on a standard CD, so one could use it like an Audio Book during
those long road trips or commutes.
As this is an older, single-layer DVD, the remaining extras
are to be found on the flip-side of the disc. Here
one can view the truncated U.S. drive-in version of the movie,
retitled The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula
and running some 14 minutes shorter. It's heavily chopped up,
with numerous scenes chronologically rearranged, leaving the vampire
action and nudity intact but gutting the narrative. Leave it to
the Yanks to take a bad film and make it even worse. The
goofy, unintentionally humorous trailer to 7
Brothers is also included. 6/22/02
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| UPDATE
This disc went OOP in 2003, then was reissued by AB as part of
a 2-disc set (pairing it with 1967's Frankenstein
Created Woman) the following year. |
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