The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

Hammer Horror! Dragon Thrills! The First Kung Fu Horror Spectacular!

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

We shall end Hammer Horror week with the grindhousiest of the Hammer films; the last of the nine Hammer Dracula movies; the movie so excellent that Christopher Lee turned it down after reading the script... 

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, of course, is not just another Gothic vampire yarn.  It has kung-fu!  It also has nine different titles and some of you may know it as the edited North American version, The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula.  Hammer Film Productions teamed up with the legendary Shaw Brothers Studio in Hong Kong to capitalize on the popularity of the kung-fu films of the early 1970s.  So now the dreaded bloodthirsty creatures are no longer lurking in some dank Transylvanian castle or crypt, they are duking it out in China.

There isn't much of a plot and there doesn't have to be because it has kung-fu dammit!  Dracula rises from the grave after being summoned by a Chinese disciple.  He takes the form of this Asian guy and travels to China to help six vampire brothers who are distressed at losing the seventh member of their gang.  Meanwhile, Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) is teaching a university class in China to a group of skeptics who ridicule him for suggesting that vampires are real.  One student does believe him because he and his 

"Shawty wanna l-l-lick me like a lollipop."

brothers and one sister are vampire hunters.  They need Van Helsing's expertise to eradicate the golden vampire minions from their town where these monsters are draining the blood of the local maidens.  The brothers and their sister team up with Van Helsing, his widower son and a wealthy European debutante to confront the six Chinese vampires and the Count Dracula himself... with kung-fu!

I really like this film.  It has Dracula, kung-fu and topless Chinese girls.  What's not to like?  Who cares if some the characters are wooden and irrelevant or that Dracula isn't frightening or really even necessary to the plot.  Somehow it all works for me, but my standards are pretty low.

Here is the trailer for The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires but I must warn you, because of the topless Chinese girls, it's NSFW.