cult film freak: PETER CUSHING TRACKS 'THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES'

Title: THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES Year: 1973 Rates: ***

Director Roy Ward Baker had nothing but complaints about the dank/uncomfortable sets in Hong Kong for what would bring the ENTER THE DRAGON martial arts craze into Hammer's horror, Count Dracula in particular, played by THE VAMPIRE LOVERS Christopher Lee surrogate John Forbes-Robinson who, during the ten-minute expository prologue, morphs into the body of roaming Satanic monk Shen Chan in order to bring together the titular LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES...

And Hammer regular Baker actually hardly used those supposedly troublesome interiors since most of GOLDEN occurs in daylight, as Cushing's college-lecturing Van Helsing ventures out with buried leads/karate-ringers David Chiang and his sister Szu Shih; Van Helsing's blandly handsome son Robin Stewart and the token Hammer blonde hottie Julie Ege...

Artwork for THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES

One problem with these VAMPIRES is there isn't seven, nor any creative scenes gathering them up... in fact there's an entire zombie army, and so, in-place of more intimate one-on-one fights are two large groups rushing at each other with swinging weapons and not nearly enough of what's needed to make the genre's blend: strategic kung-fu...

Otherwise it's not a bad traipsing adventure... the fortress sets a neat-looking hybrid of the usual Hammer torch-mounted Victorian castles, and the kind of epic Asian landscapes more similar to Kurosawa's 7 SAMURAI than any of the co-producing Shaw Brothers' kung-fu programmers... there just needed stronger heroes and far less of those battling hordes, which makes it difficult for the audience to keep score.