The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

On paper, this co-op effort from Shaw Bros and Hammer sounds like the most amazing thing. As in, 'if you could go back in time and get two studios to combine powers, who'd you pick' levels of amazing. And as always, reality can't live up to the mental pictures one might have. It's all just kinda bland and silly and oh hey nudity and unimpressive. Major props for Peter Cushing though, taking what should've been a schlocky role and just giving it his all. Heartbreaking that this wasn't more fun.

No other serious actor would read this script, willingly accept it, and treat every line as if his entire career depended on it being delivered to perfection. Peter Cushing is my hero.

Kung Fu & horror don't sound like they'd go together well & they don't here. 1 genre relies on suspense & the other on fight scene thrills. To be fair this hybrid seems about as well written as can be expected for the time & budget, adding some character moments & relationships so we can care somewhat, but they're not developed enough. The last 2 fight scenes get better by raising stakes, but are also way too long & have unimpressive & sloppy choreography. The score's great but makeup's awful.

It's a Shaw Bros/Hammer co-production so you can expect some fun fights and a lot of cheesy moments, but it doesn't really cohere into anything special. The story is bland and the east/west pull of the action leaves surprisingly little satisfaction.

All those points are for Peter Cushing, who never in his life phoned it in, and for that unmistakable cheap-ass Hammer production design that I always enjoy. The rest of this movie failed to work, and wasn't even charming about it. For being a Shaw Bros/Hammer collaboration, this isn't a tenth as entertaining as it had the potential to be.

Combine a slowly-languishing British horror film studio and a somewhat diminished kung-fu studio and you get: Peter Cushing channeling Shakespeare, a blonde bombshell who adds little to the plot, and some skipping zombies. Oh, there's a few martial arts fights in there too. It's cheesy in a mostly fun way, although I wish the ending wasn't such a letdown. As a martial arts fan, it was OK; if I were a horror fan, I don't think I'd enjoy this as much.

Surprisingasiantitslool+thecamp/comedy/coolnessisntenough-seemsfunnytheythoughtthiswouldbewesternenough

The combination of Hammer horror and Shaw Bros kung fu sounds amazing, but they couldn't work together and it shows. The 90-minute cut I saw stretched out pointlessly in the middle and mooshed the big confrontation into the last 20 minutes. Peter Cushing is as strong as ever, and David Chiang is quite good opposite him, but the pointless Leyland Van Helsing drags down the character side, the romance is tepid at best, and the plot could be interesting if they told it completely differently.

The premise and a Hammer/Shaw Brothers collaboration sounds fucking incredible, but it never really kicks into any sort of higher gear. Cushing on autopilot is always watchable though.

Poor.

It's silly, but it's fun and holds together on a story level far more than you'd expect, but it's really undone by some truly awful filmmaking, the camerawork in particular is really poor.

Much better than you'd imagine.

Kung-Fu, Vampires and Zombies! How can you go wrong? This is a hidden gem and a b-movie classic!