The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires

Ege Of Darkness

The Legend Of The
Seven Golden Vampires
UK/Hong Kong 1974
Directed by Roy Ward Baker and
Chang Cheh (uncredited action sequences)
Hammer/Shaw Brothers/Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone A

The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires was the very last of Hammer’s Dracula cycle, made in collaboration with the famous Shaw Brothers and, despite attempts made to regain Christopher Lee as Dracula one last time, he declined after reading the script. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with this one for reasons I’ll get into in a minute but, I have to say on this rewatch, polished up for a lovely stateside Blu Ray release from Shout Factory, the film looks better than any previous versions I’ve owned and, I also had a lot more fun with it. I’m wondering now if the last version I saw was maybe the cut down US release version, The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula, because some of the sequences are in a much different order than I remember them from my last viewing and it all makes a bit more sense this time around.

One person who does return, in a lovely portrayal of the original Van Helsing, is Peter Cushing in one of the roles that made him a household name, looking very dapper throughout most of the shoot in a reddish brown jacket which looks very much like the ones he wore the decade before in the two Dr. Who movies (reviewed here and here). Alas, he’s my main problem with the movie also... or rather, the inclusion of his character is... I’ll get to the elephant in the room in a little while, I promise.

He’s joined in this by Robin Stewart as his son (who seems to spend the entire movie looking like a clone of Ralph Bates for this one) and the lovely Julie Ege as his female benefactor (for the cost of coming along on a specific mission with Van Helsing). Plus a whole bunch of Shaw Brothers actors including the legends (in my opinion) that are David Chiang and Szu Shih and, I have to say, they’re all pretty good. The film starts off with Dracula (played by John Forbes-Robertson, in absolutely no way similarly to Lee) who quickly steals the body of a Chinese guy, goes to China and lives there for 100 years with his fierce Seven Golden Vampires plus their undead, zombie slaves. Then Van Helsing and crew go to protect the village which Dracula holds in a grip of terror in a romp of a tale which is a heady mix of kung fu action with typically entertaining Hammer vampire nonsense kind of grafted onto it (or vice versa, if you like).

That being said, I think the chorography on the fight scenes on this one are nowhere near as interesting as the regular Shaw Brothers movies I’ve seen from these actors and, I think that out of all of them, it’s Szu Shih who seems the best of the bunch, showing off her dynamic fighting skills much more in keeping with what you would expect if it was purely a Shaw Brothers production.

It mostly looks nice with some beautiful frame compositions and an almost Bava sense of lighting in some places, where actors and sets are lit two tone from a range of colour palettes such as blues, greens, reds and mauve washes of colour, which really pop and bring interest to the shots. That being said, for some reason the external location shots seem to be quite muddy and dull to look at on this one, in contrast to the sequences which are studio bound. You can certainly see the difference between the clarity of the visuals on this beautiful Shout Factory transfer, for sure. There are also some brief sequences of topless women and bodice ripping galore (although, sadly, not in the case of the constantly bosomy and brilliant Julie Ege) and some nice special effects when each of the seven golden vampires reverts back to the dust from which they came. Although, a badly fake rubber bat flying behind a vertical rock while a vampire jumps out from the other side of the same rock is not the most convincing transformation sequence, it has to be said.

And, yeah, it’s a nice enough final film in the series but, it has the awful problems of continuity in terms of both the Van Helsing and Dracula characters in the film, which not only contradict the film fitting into the previous Hammer Dracula movies... it also contradicts itself in this story too. To explain...

We know from Dracula AD 1972 (reviewed here) that the original Van Helsing, who this character does seem to be, according to some dialogue referring back to his past encounters with Dracula, perished in the year 1872. The prologue to that film sees Dracula and Van Helsing killing each other but with Dracula being revived from powdered blood spilled then, 100 years later (where Peter Cushing plays the great grandson of the character he played in this prologue). However, in The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires, Dracula has already taken the form of the Chinese guy 1804 and has gone to China for 100 years, until he meets up with the original Van Helsing in this film in the year 1904. So not only does this transformation take place long before he could have remet Van Helsing, it also predates the previous Dracula films... a complete impossibility if this film is to be believed. And, hello, if Van Helsing dies in 1872, then how come he’s running around and still getting into trouble in 1904? Especially when he clearly states that he’s met Dracula and fought him before... erm... except hasn’t Dracula been hiding as a Chinese guy for 100 years? How did they meet again?

So yeah, no matter which way you look at it, the film is a total nonsense. The script could have easily been fixed to change dates and historical durations of events in this film but, well, it looks like nobody could be bothered with keeping any sense of continuity within these films. And it just doesn’t work. So, if continuity is your thing (and why wouldn’t it be?) then maybe this final entry in the Hammer Dracula saga isn’t for you.

That being said, though, I did enjoy this presentation of The Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires far more than I expected to and, yeah, it’s a hard film not to have a good time with. Like I said, it’s a boy’s own kind of romp, a bit like the Hammer version of She but with added kung fu goodness. A nice thing is the addition of a score by James Bernard but, somehow, his famous Hammer Dracula theme seems somewhat flat when you don’t have Christopher Lee accompanying it on screen. Still, it is what it is and I got a lot more out of it this time. Definitely worth a watch if you are a lover of what Hammer were doing during this period and, certainly a very odd blend of two studios presenting a kind of subdued mixture of what they both did best.

Outland

Io Pic

Outland
USA 1981 Directed by Peter Hyams
HMV/Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Full plot spoilers.

It’s been a while since I last saw Outland but I do try and watch it at least once on every home video format I eventually own it on... now it’s the turn of Blu Ray and, it has to be said, the film really hasn’t lost much of its power.

I first saw it at the cinema on the year of its release. I was 13 years old but the film was an AA rating, which was nobody under the age of 14... so I either lied about my age by a year or just wasn’t challenged on the door (I forget which).

The film is set on Io, the third largest moon of the five surrounding Jupiter, on a titanium mining colony run by Con-Am. Sean Connery plays the new marshal of the colony, Marshal O’Niel. He’s only been there a couple of weeks but his wife has had enough of being sent from one grubby outpost to the next and so she takes their son and goes to the nearest space station, waiting for a flight back to Earth (their son has never seen the planet he reads about in books). However, O’Neil can’t join them for now because there’s something bad happening at the mining colony and he’s onto something which is killing people. People are doing things like uncoupling their space suits while out on the surface (we watch in graphic detail as their blood boils and their heads explode as the air and organs inside fight to get out... at least, I’m guessing that’s the scientific idea behind those kinds of deaths... maybe they just look cool), travelling down to the outside in the lifts without any suit at all and just generally going mad.

Teaming up with Dr. Lazarus, played by the incomparable Frances Sternhagen, he discovers that these psychotic episodes went up hugely after the arrival of the branch director. So he starts digging and soon uncovers a bunch of people supplying drugs to increase manpower within the mining community, which also eventually makes their customers psychotic... and it all points back to the company, or at least the branch manager, played by Peter Boyle. However, after O’Neil finds and destroys a shipment of drugs, hit men are sent to kill him, arriving on the next shuttle. And, of course, nobody really wants to help him defend himself from these killers.

Okay, so when I was a kid there were two pieces of conventional wisdom about this film which I took with a grain of salt but do still acknowledge that there is something to them. Firstly that this is a remake of High Noon (reviewed here). Well, of course the last 25 minutes, where O’Neil’s potential allies abandon him to his fate and he has to take on the killers alone (more or less), is absolutely an homage to High Noon but, the film is not a complete remake because High Noon was all about that right from the start of the movie. The first two thirds of Outland, however, are a strong police procedural thriller, which happens to take place on a moon of Jupiter. It’s definitely got its own vibe going and it does what it does very successfully.

The other bit of conventional wisdom at the time of its release... and I remember reading this phrase at the time in Film Review, the ABC cinema chain’s monthly magazine that they sold in the kiosk... was that it’s a ‘poor man’s Alien’. Nope. Neither film has much in common other than the one huge influence of Alien (on pretty much everything at the time) of the lived-in, aged up sets with a kind of built in obsolescence. So yeah, it’s certainly gone down that route but, no, it’s a ‘poor man’s’ nothing.

What it is, is a top notch thriller with brilliant performances by both Connery and Sternhagen (who have remarkable chemistry together... how come these two weren’t teamed up in another film?) backed up by a, perhaps slightly simple but certainly solid story and what were, for the time, state-of-the-art special effects... which generally have, for the most part, aged well and don’t look too clunky on the Blu Ray format. What ages the film most is the nature of the computer graphics on the screens but, like a lot of speculative movie fiction, if the film makers had guessed how advanced things have gotten by today, then the films would have lacked credibility for the audiences of the time, for sure. I especially like the interactive, screen golf game that Peter Boyle’s character plays in his apartment.

And, added to this, it’s all supported by a really great score by the fabulous Jerry Goldsmith. He was in his phase where he was experimenting with very subtle electronic augmentation to the orchestra and it’s a truly wonderful score, mixing the dense atmospheric cues of the depressing environment the miners work in with some wonderful action cues which never let the toes stop tapping (I still listen to it on my bus journey home some evenings).

So that’s me on Outland. One of the great science fiction movies of the early 1980s and some of the best of cinema of that era, for sure. Definitely worth checking out if you’ve never seen it and especially if you like police procedural thrillers.