Day 7: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974), dir. by Roy Ward Baker and Chang Cheh
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By the mid-Seventies, Hammer Film Productions was in terminal decline. Their brand of horror had aged and lost its edge. Their flaw was fundamental to their very identity. While they updated the classic Universal monsters with more sex appeal and more blood, those movies were ultimately still retro throw-backs even in their own time. Dracula A.D. 1972 was seen as a pathetic poser film for a reason.
The heart and soul of these films
are painfully conservative. No matter what horrors may appear, in the end the rational
minds of well-mannered White Men of Authority will overcome them. Peter Cushing’s
Van Helsing is unemotional, dignified, and more chaste than a nun. Even for audiences fifty years ago, this was too old-fashioned. Hammer could not compete with the new wave of more diverse, more transgressive, and more exploitative
competition. Every huge hit of the late-Sixties and Seventies like Night of the
Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and Halloween were more nails hammered into Hammer’s coffin.
If the Seventies were too modern for them, Hammer would not last a minute in the Eighties. And they didn’t. Their last movie came out in 1979, and the doors closed on the Hammer brand name for thirty years.
Fortunately for us, when a studio is dying, they start rolling
the dice in pretty wild ways. Hammer was desperate by 1974 to figure out any
way to make their horror franchises feel relevant. Somebody looked around and
thought “hmm, Hong Kong fung-fu cinema is becoming popular, why not a kung-fu
Dracula movie?” To my immense joy, nobody in the boardroom responded with “that’s
the worst idea I’ve ever heard, it doesn’t make any sense”. Therefore,
Hammer Films teamed up with the legendary Hong Kong studio, Shaw Brothers, to
create the final movie in their Dracula series, The Legend of the 7 Golden
Vampires.
Needless to say, this did not save Hammer. In another
universe, this would have launched an entire sub-genre of martial arts horror.
Bruce Lee vs Frankenstein is a movie we deserved to see. Instead, this seems to
have been a flop on both continents. Director Roy Ward Baker called it “a
failure, an absolute failure”. Luckily, Baker only directed half the movie, maybe even less than half.
Personally, I’m so happy this thing exists. I cannot say this
is a masterpiece of either martial arts or gothic horror. Mixing those things
together on paper sounds as appetizing as mixing together soy sauce and cream
cheese. But can’t knock it until you try it.
One of the issues Hammer seemed to have with these Dracula
updates is that they’ll bring Dracula to new and fantastic places, but they refuse
to let Dracula out of his bubble. Dracula does not karate chop anybody here. We
open the movie in 1804 Transylvania, where an evil Chinese priest, Kah (Chan
Shen) begs Dracula for help. His native vampires (the Chinese Vampire being a
whole tradition separate from the European legends) have all been defeated, and
he hopes to revive them with Dracula’s power. Dracula – disappointingly not
played by Christopher Lee but instead John Forbes-Robertson – kills Kah, steals
his body, and goes off to China to set up shop. He builds an evil castle with,
as the title implies, seven golden vampires as his servants, kidnapping
half-naked women for some vague reason. Dracula then sits out the rest of the movie, until he’s the Final Boss.
We cut to 1904, where Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing is
visiting Chongqing, China to investigate stories of vampirism. You might
remember that our last movie stated clearly that Van Helsing and Dracula both
died in 1872 and you might be wondering that if Dracula has been in China for
100 years, when did Van Helsing battle him before? Just put those thoughts
aside. Solid continuity was not a concern in cinema back then.
Van Helsing and his handsome son Leyland (Robin Stewart) run
into first the beautiful Norwegian blonde, Vanessa (Julie Ege), and then the beautiful action lead of the movie, Hsi Ching (Hong Kong superstar, David Chiang). Hsi
Ching leads a band of seven brothers all with their own special Job Class completely with a signature weapon. This crew then marches off to Dracula’s Castle and the next
hour of the movie is immense action spectacles. Just big set pieces with lots
of heroes fighting lots of ghouls and various other nonsense.
There is something hilarious about how this movie brings Peter Cushing, this great classically trained actor, and mostly uses him to stand around watching kung-fu. Cushing looks so out of his element in these scenes, especially since he was over sixty-years-old and always was as skinny as a twig. Remarkably, later in the movie, Cushing actually does do some fighting with vampires. And in a shocking moment, Cushing falls nearly face-first into a firepit. This had to be a dangerous mistake that could have gone very wrong, yet they kept it in the movie.
Robin Stewart and Julie Ege add next to nothing
to the movie, meanwhile. They are just here to be generically handsome or to wear a very tight
white tank top. However, to 7 Golden Vampire’s credit, it does pair its European
and Chinese characters romantically. Lorrimer Van Helsing’s mom may have been
from Chongqing.
Also, there is something fascinating about the Chinese take on horror. Their rules of vampirism are vaguer and more magical than what we’ve seen
so far. The vampires other than Dracula are these mummified creatures with little beady
eyes and golden masks. Surrounding them are zombies and that often look
cheesy, sure, but can also be spooky with their exaggerated movements and sheer numbers. The
Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires actually shoots quite a lot of its scenes at
night, not Day for Night, and so the lighting looks great. There’s also a lot
of gratuitous nudity. This is not some masterpiece of filthy exploitation
horror like The Boxer’s Omen or The Seventh Curse, but it is certainly creepy and
unpredictable and a hell of a spectacle.
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is deeply flawed, deeply
confused, often confusing, and something of a mess. But I’m immensely happy it
exists. We’re saying goodbye to Classic Dracula for awhile now, and we could
not be leaving him behind on a weirder note.
Next Time: Rewinding back to 1966 with Vincent Price in a the vampire apocalypse, The Last Man on Earth.
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