Hammer-Time!: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Dir Roy Ward Baker, 1h29m, 1974)

All careers end in failure. Hammer Films would stagger on to 1979, their final film being a thankless and utterly unnecessary remake of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, but by the mid 1970s the writing was on the wall, and its final four years were little more than a zombified studio stumbling on. They would return from the grave in the early 2000s-and we would even see Christopher Lee star one final time in a Hammer Film in the enjoyably chilling The Resident (2011), but whilst the resurrected studio's track record is remarkably even, most notably the genuinely terrifying The Woman In Black (2012), it rarely has the quintessentially British charm of the original studio. The final half-decade of Hammer's existence, however, has one final curio, a team-up with the titan of Hong Kong cinema, in which, against the background of early 20th Century China, Peter Cushing's Van Helsing faces off with Dracula one final time, in a film that-at least attempts to-blend the kung fu action of the Shaw Brothers, and the horror of Hammer Films, to mixed results.

Even for Hammer, The Legend of The Seven Golden Vampires has a curious origin story. Script-writer Don Houghton, also the mind behind Dracula AD 1972, and the writer of two of the better Third Doctor stories in long-running sci-fi series, Doctor Who, 's father in law (his wife being Pik-Sen Lim, famous for multiple appearances on British TV in the 1970s and 1980s, and the narrator of the Dark Souls videogame trilogy), happened to know the then head of the Shaw Brothers, Run Run Shaw, and convinced him to co-produce the film. Having begun life in the late 1920s as cinema owners and distributors, by the 1970s Shaw Brothers Studio had basically codified the rules of the kung-fu genre, even as their rival, Golden Harvest launched the genre into the stratosphere with Enter the Dragon (1973). Hollywood, of course, took notice, from the (Christopher Lee-starring) Man with the Golden Gun (1974) outward, (not to mention the hundreds of "Bruceploitation" films) and Hammer saw an opportunity to reinvigorate a now painfully tired formula.

Despite this, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires begins with a typically Hammerish opening; despite the introduction of the Taoist monk, Kah (Chan Shen), the high priest of the Temple of the Seven Golden Vampires, traipsing through the Transylvanian countryside, warded away by a local shepherd, and soon arriving at the ominous, and now clearly cheap-looking castle of Count Dracula. Dracula (a doublehander between John Forbes-Robertson, who physically plays the Count, and veteran voice over actor, David de Keyser), soon emerges, bolt upright. Told the woes of the increasingly vulnerable Seven Golden Vampires in Kah's native China, Dracula proceeds to possess the monk to escape Transylvania, and the film jumps forward a hundred years, to introduce Cushing's Van Helsing, as he discusses the history of the village the Seven Golden Vampires allegedly haunt and rule over, to the scepticism of most of his students.

So far, the setup of Seven Golden Vampires feels typical for later Hammer-there's some undeniable parallels with Dracula AD 1972, in that Dracula himself doesn't appear on screen much, is restricted to bookending the film, whilst Cushing does much of the narrative heavy lifting around a younger cast on whom much of the film rests. Considering the stunt work and the large amount of martial arts that preponderates the rest of the film, including this flashback-Cushing was by this point, 61-it's hardly surprising that he takes a back seat in the action scenes, taken up by the Shaw Brothers Studios actors. One of these is Hsi Ching (David Chiang), who quickly reveals that he is from the very village that the Seven Golden Vampires haunt, and manages to convince Van Helsing to travel with him to the village to defeat them. With his son Leyland (Robin Stewart), a travelling noble, Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), and Chiang and his siblings in tow, following a martial arts-heavy altercation that begins to reveal the problems with the film, despite having much of the Shaw Bros team involved in front and indeed behind the camera.

In essence-the film is split in half, with Shaw managing the action scenes, in which the Chinese actors do impressive martial arts (to the extent that the Chinese cut of the film is twenty minutes longer than the British) in which much of the Hammer-centric cast take a back seat, whilst Roy Ward Baker filmed the Hammer-esque material. It works...in places. Sometimes, for example when Van Helsing, Ching and their travelling companions are ambushed, the experiment works. This, essentially, parallel production lends itself well to the fight scenes, and the most dramatic moments-the scene in which Kah's zombie army rise from the earth in Van Helsing's retelling of the story, and indeed in his later encounter with them is a perfect mix of Hammer's viscerality, their gothic sensibility, and, as they proceed to attack hapless combatants, so the Shaw Bros' kinetic fight scenes break out, where all manner of weaponry is brought to bear against the undead in spectacular fashion.

When it works, in short, it's a perfect melding of styles, Hammer's mastery of atmosphere and special effects and Peter Cushing's unique presence as the occult authority married to dazzling displays of martial arts, quickly and effectively shot fight scenes, and nigh-peerless choreography. The problem is that the two studios are rarely in such tandem-Hammer, in particular, seem, from subsequent interviews and the clear lack of cohesion between the two modes of the film, somewhat lost in translation. Van Helsing tends to simply disappear during the martial arts scenes, or appear only in occasional reaction shots, whilst the Shaw Brothers' choreography occasionally feels overly ambitious, or makes our heroes seem simply too powerful in a filmography where our heroes have always felt on the back foot.

For Hammer, the Seven Golden Vampires, when they appear on screen, seem somewhat of an afterthought, badly made masks over not terribly scary prosthetics, whilst, when Kah/Dracula finally appears, it's only so he can changed back into Forbes-Robinson. For all the daring nature of making a kung-fu vampire movie, it's tiresomely reductive that this ends up as yet another confrontation between Van Helsing and the Count Dracula, Hammer once again unable to let go of their classic foes to their loss. Like Dracula AD 1972, one is left with a sense of what could have been, a true rival to Enter the Dragon, tied to a tried and tested studio in Britain with a shot of gothic horror to make it truly unique. More even than Dracula AD 1972, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires feels like a studio battling its own mortality, unable to resurrect itself one final time, and this time finally out of fresh blood to feed upon, Hammer would succumb to the inevitable. They'd be resurrected, with time. But they'd never be the same.

Rating: Recommended

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is available to watch online in the UK via Amazon Prime and on DVD from Warner Bros It is not currently available to stream, but is available on DVD from Warner Bros in the United States.

Next week, we carry on our travels with the Shaw Brothers as we enter the world of wuxia action as a young woman seeks to rescue her brother, only to be embroiled in the world of martial arts in Come Drink With Me.

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