Films: 1970s
(1974) The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
Thursday, January 01, 2015
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
Director: Roy Ward Baker
Release: 1974
Writer Don Houghton returns to the page with a fervor only hinted at in his previous two modern-day installments. "Legend ..." at once returns to the turn of the century, and explodes the Stoker vampire myth with something if not wholly original, then unique in its amalgamation of disparate story types.
Peter Cushing resumes his role as the original Professor Van Helsing (after two films as the grandson Lorimar). Here, he's traveled to Chung King, China to solicit the help of the country's senior academics in searching for a legendary village plagued by what he surmises are Eastern vampires.
Van Helsing is right, but there is more at work than cross-cultural undead counterparts. Count Dracula (this time played by stand-in John Forbes-Robertson, who appears as the traditional Western Count only at the film's beginning and end) has come to China.
Occupying a servant's body (Shen Chan, as Kah), Dracula lords over the seven titular monsters, who regularly ride out and plunder the village of its young women - returning with them to a blood-soaked temple in which they feed and boil their life fluids in a giant bubbling cauldron.
But Van Helsing is oblivious to this coming confrontation. He is recruited instead by exiled village martial arts master Hsi Ching (the athletic and charismatic David Chiang), and Ching's six siblings - each wielding a signature weapon, from bow to double-headed axes.
Ching implores and convinces Van Helsing to make an expedition to the Hsis' beset family home and cleanse it of evil.
Joining the octet are Van Helsing's son Leyland (Robin Stewart, forming the missing bridge between the professor and Lorimar, for followers of the series), and a rich Nordic heiress named Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege).
The ten fight their way across China, rallying the village against the seven vampires and their undead army. The martial artists battle spectacularly. The combats are choreographed with loose, sometimes marvelous, inventiveness. "Legend ..." is a lot of fun.
Houghton is wise in that he builds into this reckless bare-knuckled adventure a sense of great cost to the His family. Lives are forfeit so that Van Helsing might achieve the temple and heart of the evil, encounter Count Dracula in his true form and end the Transylvanian's intrusion into the East. The demise of two-dimensional but fetching fighters lends sadness to the backdrop of the film.
With all this falls-to-climb methodology, it is tempting to view Dracula's advent in the Chinese village as a metaphoric look at Western influence upon other cultures. Houghton and director Roy Ward Baker are up to no such politics, however. In fact, "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires" suffers the worst of the Hammer films' problem with the Count, completely abandoning him as a narrative necessity. It is no wonder Christopher Lee opted out of this chapter.
Instead, the Carpathian vampire lord simply takes up residence in the Chinese temple, expressing some ill-crafted thought at film's start that he might be sick of his moldy mountain castle back home.
"Legend ..." is about oppression by one's own. From the feudal gangster of Chung King crime lord Leung Hon to the masked and fanged raiders in the highlands, the worst enemies in Houghton's story are one's countrymen.
Instead of geopolitical struggle, "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires" is a surface, but legitimate, look at interclass warfare - the peasants of the village and the bejeweled and rapacious forces that descend from the symbolic "mansion on the hill," in this case the doubly meaningful structure of the temple.
The vampires fight with swords on horseback, the Hsis retaliate with spikes, fire, and weapons wrought from original peasants' tools - axes, clubs, bows, and the like.
The Western characters in the script are posited as visiting aristocracy - fabulously wealthy or forever privileged to comfortable lives within universities. As the Van Helsing's and Buren struggle across China, Leyland and Vanessa fall in love with simpler - if stereotypical - Chinese opposites.
Houghton and Baker present the romance sincerely, but the ideas remain ephemeral - creating more bemusement on the part of the senior Van Helsing than any actual transformation.
At last, "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires" is the cul de sac into which Hammer drove its Dracula. Fully divorced from Bram Stoker, the franchise sputters to a halt as a mere vehicle for experimentation, never coming full circle to its roots, never paying off so much as celebrating a last hurrah and dissolving like its villain into something intangible and inconsequential.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, 1974
The Western characters in the script are posited as visiting aristocracy - fabulously wealthy or forever privileged to comfortable lives within universities.
