Thursday, March 3, 2011

Golden Vampires in 1974



one of the cooler things you get when fads of movies are dying out is the inevitable mixing of genres.  happens all the time with movies, and even between themselves (see The One Armed Swordsmen (1976) or The One Armed Swordsmen (1976)). 

The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires is such a movie.  it's a lot of fun, though sadly missing Christopher Lee as Dracula.  when it was brought over to the US several years later it was badly edited into a near incomprehensible mess.  fortunately DVD rescued it from that.  heck, I even had a VHS tape with both versions on it, thanks to Anchor Bay.

the kung fu is pretty good here, but they had to tone it down as it would overshadow the rest of the movie.  it would have been kind of cool to see a hopping vampire as well, but these are minor quibbles.  fun to hear David Chiang speak in his real voice, too.

1 comment:

Danny Coffin said...

I always liked this movie,though as you pointed out it IS kind of odd Christopher Lee wasn't tapped to play Ol' Vlad;also,WHY didn't Hammer let Lau KarLeung&Tong Gaai direct the fight scenes?!?(Don't get me wrong,the fight scenes are cool but with Lau&Tong choreographing they could've been INCREDIBLE...)I'm surprised we didn't see any gyongsi hopping around in the flick,too.