The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

“If vampirism exists in Eastern Europe, and I can assure you it does, there is no reason to question its existence in other parts of the world. Its foundation, its very beginnings, may have stemmed from ancient China“.

It causes a certain discomfort having to sit and listen to the crazy rantings that poor Peter Cushing finds himself forced to utter in this terrible mishmash of vampirism and martial arts. The half-baked idea of blenderizing two such radically different genres was the brainchild of Hammer producer Don Houghton, also responsible for the heinous crime that was the film’s screenplay. His “vision” was to exploit the unexpected success achieved in the West by wuxia and kung fu movies by signing an agreement with Shaw Brothers Studio, a well-known Hong Kong film production company, providing for the co-production of two films to be shot entirely on location in China (the other was 1975’s “Shatter”).

The result, which can be partially blamed on strained relations between the British team and local workers, is basically unpalatable: the trashy comic-book plot is disconcertingly thin (to pad the running time, Baker is forced to resort to a series of cheap tricks, from stretching out dull flashbacks to constantly using slow-motion), the actors look bewildered, the makeup and SXF are sloppy beyond belief, and the cinematography is noxious (John Wilcox and Roy Ford, unaware that a genius such as Mario Bava is born and not made, play with color to no end, experimenting with lurid tonalities and avant-garde contrasts to the point that we get a greenish Dracula that looks like he’s ingested five pounds of enriched uranium).

The film’s sad descent is capped off by an absolute disregard for Bram Stoker’s traditions: Rather than the familiar vampires of the literary source, we get repulsive pillagers leading a horde of zombies not unlike those of the Italian film “Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror” (1981) by Andrea Bianchi, and instead of crosses, images of the Buddha can now ward off vampires. The icing on the cake though, is the film’s take on the theme of female emancipation, perhaps incongruous in this context to start with, but which is approached with the superficiality typical of someone with little or nothing to say on the subject who simply rehashes platitudes only to then contradict them at the first opportunity (“It displeased you?” the Chinese girl asks apprehensively in response to the idiotic observations of the pretty boy du jour).

A truly ugly way to bid adieu to a glorious cycle that over its nearly 20-year duration had given us some exquisitely produced gems.