The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

"Sometimes there is a mashup of styles that make you say “this film will probably won’t work but it will be interesting”. 7 Golden Vampires, a co-production between the British gothic horror studio Hammer and the Hong Kong based Shaw Brothers martial arts factory, is definitely one of those. Peter Cushing plays Van Helsing, for the 7th and final time in his career, who has gone to Asia to study reports of vampires abroad. Unbeknownst to him, his old nemesis Dracula has once again risen from the grave and taken an Asian vampire’s body as host and is trying to resurrect the seven titular creatures. David Chiang plays the Hong Kong lead who is assisting Van Helsing. He and his “siblings” carry most of the action (though Cushing does wave his torch around with gusto occasionally). There are some decent martial arts sequences where they fend off the vampires and hordes of really ineffective zombies but the action isn’t that strong. Other than its camp value, I can only recommend this as a curiosity because combining these studios’ forces only seemed to have diluted the power of both. 2.75 out of 5 stars"