This is the weakest connection to the Dracula series. It feels more like Hammer films had a Chinese vampire movie and decided to plug Dracula and Van Helsing into it to link into the franchise.
Van Helsing wants to find out about Chinese Vampires. Fortunately, Dracula decided to take over the body of a Chinese man and resurrect the 7 Golden vampires. Cue... well, many, many martial arts fighting sequences. There's around half a dozen of them as the vampires and the Hsi brothers face off time and again. Eventually Van Helsing faces Dracula, because that's the framing device of the movie, but it's very abrupt.
While we have Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, Dracula is played by John Forbes-Robertson. At least the movie has a good reason for bad dubbing of the main Chinese villain lead, Shen Chan. We also get a lot of bad, yes I'm saying bad, vampire masks for the supposedly golden vampires.
Yet, despite the make up, despite the insertion of Dracula, this is a decent Chinese vampire movie. Why couldn't Hammer have just left that as it was? Perhaps they want a new series, and tried this as a bridging movie?
And that's it. We end on a movie that should be its own thing. I might come back to Hammer movies, but for now I have something else in mind...
[END]
Saturday, 10 September 2016
The Legend of the 7 Golden Kampires
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1 comment:
You make a good point about how this film ought to have been it's own thing, but alas Warners (the distributors) always insisted on the Count appearing.
I hope you do come back to Hammer (and when you do: I shall be waiting....)
Maybe try the Frankenstein cycle next?
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