Remember Godzilla vs. The Devil, that bizarre 1970s East-meets-West co-production that wound up being more urban myth than lost film? Aren’t you mad that it’s not a real thing? Does it soften the blow for you to find out that, in 1974, the UK’s Hammer Studios and Hong Kong’s Shaw Bros. teamed up to make Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, a movie about warrior monks tussling with Dracula? Because that shit actually happened.
Audiences flocked to see kung fu epics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Shaw Bros. used their prominence in that genre to become the largest moviemaking conglomerate in China. When they began to dub their films for distribution outside of China, they proved just as profitable as in the home market, and the West took notice. Specifically, Hammer wanted to use the appeal of their martial arts films to revive interest in their gothic horror cycle, which had begun almost two decades earlier with Curse of Frankenstein (1957).
Golden Vampires works on the Reese’s Principle, that two great tastes should taste great together. It may sound like a surefire recipe for success, but there’s a reason that Reese’s cups aren’t filled with guacamole instead of peanut butter. In this case, the chocolate shell is a film about Dracula and Dr. Van Helsing, while the guacamole is extended sequences of Hong Kong action stars beating up a bunch of bunny-hopping vampires. Like our imaginary confection, the film’s two flavors don’t mesh together seamlessly, but you should still try it, if only to be able to say you did.
The film’s plot, in broad-ass strokes: Kah (Shen Cheh), the priest of a Chinese vampire cult, travels all the way to Transylvania to ask Count Dracula (John Forbes-Robertson) to help out the titular auric undead. Little does he know that his arch-foe, Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), is using a visiting professorship at Chungking University as a flimsy excuse to drum up support for his private war against the undead. In a delightful subversion, a Western imperialist gets his research on vampirism dismissed as primitive superstition by a lecture hall filled with Chinese scholars. Van Helsing must therefore assemble the vampire hunting A-Team of his son Leyland (Robin Stewart), a wealthy Scandinavian widow (Julie Ege), and a company of kung fu monks led by siblings Hsi Ching (David Chiang) and Mai Kwei (Shi Szu).
To put it lightly, it’s a departure from your standard vampire lore. However, all of those tropes are true only of the Western vampire, and if we’re being real, only of the post-Lugosi Hollywood vampire. Chinese vampires are apparently a completely different beast.
Instead of lurking around gothic castles, they have BDSM-themed human sacrifice parties. Rather than creeping in the shadows, they hop at high speed. They eschew tuxedos in favor of giant golden bat medallions. If you yank off those bats and touch them to statues of the Buddha, they burst into flames. They also gallop around on horseback, swinging swords and commanding legions of shambling ghouls. Modern viewers are sure to get a real Game of Thrones vibe from them, like a company of White Walkers with heavy makeup instead of CGI.
As unfamiliar as the supernatural tropes are, the rest of Hammer’s hallmarks are there: the technicolor gothic sensibilities, the queasy Victorian sexuality, the sprays of candy apple red blood. I mean, dignified-ass Peter Cushing is in this, playing the same Dr. Van Helsing he played for years, and all his gravitas is still there. Still, the character loses some of his appeal when you pluck him out of a drawing room mystery and set him down next to a raucous wuxia sequence. Those sequences are also fantastic, even if we have to keep cutting away from them to show all the white characters looking on pensively.
The film’s biggest disappointment is the absence of Mr. Hammer Horror himself, Christopher Lee. Lee’s cultured-but-bestial take on the character is second only to Lugosi in its cultural impact, but each installment of the series made the count into more and more of a generic boogeyman. John Forbes-Robertson isn’t the worst Dracula I’ve ever seen — I’m looking your way, Gerard Butler — but it’s quite jarring to see a Hammer Dracula that’s not Lee, especially since they managed to get his eternal onscreen rival Cushing to sign on.
Perhaps because Lee declined further participation, Vampires is the official end of Hammer’s Dracula series. Since Horror of Dracula (1958), Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing had defeated Dracula a good half dozen times, apparently unaware that stakes and crucifixes are way more effective when paired with nunchucks. It’s just so strange for a long-running series like this to end with a one-off novelty film. I suppose it’s not quite as dissonant as Abbott and Costello definitively killing off the iconic Universal monsters after a 15 year reign of terror, but it’s in the ballpark.
I don’t want you to take any of this to mean that Vampires is bad, because it isn’t. It’s just weird, and sublimely so, exactly what you’d expect from a movie that pits kung fu against vampirism. Is it a worthy end to Hammer’s Dracula series? Maybe. Is there anything else like it? Nope. Do you owe it to yourself to track it down and bask in its all-consuming weirdness? Absolutely.
