Saw this at the AFI theatre the other night, and it was spectacularly awful. There needs to be a word for that— spectaculawful or aw-ful-some or something… but I digress.
Also known as “The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula” (and, in fact, the print we viewed had that title on screen), this flick saw the merging of the awful campy Hammer horror films (with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing) with the kung-fu moves of the Shaw brothers Hong Kong studios. It starts with a pretty incomprehensible opening sequence where we see Dracula take over the body of a chinese vampire master, and about 4 or 5 repeats of the same slo-mo footage of his vampires raping and pillaging about the countryside. After that, a lot of it was pretty laughable by today’s standards, but a lot of fun, and even the vampire disintegrating effects were pretty good for their time. The kung-fu was also quite good in places, and having Julie Ege (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) stand around and look pretty wasn’t too bad either. 2 stars.