With shows like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and movies like the Blade franchise successfully upping the ante on action-horror in recent years, the 1974 Hammer hybrid Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires is certainly due for a reconsideration. A close-to-last-ditch attempt by the waning British horror film studio to pull in audiences that had switched their allegiances from gothic grue to chopsocky fighting, the movie was produced in collaboration with prolific Hong Kong kung fu producers the Shaw Brothers. The results are a messy hybrid - more Shaw than Hammer, actually - that's ultimately more goofily entertaining than gothically scary. But if you're not depressed by the spectacle of this once top-notch B-movie factory yielding to a standard of horror filmmaking that makes the Mexican Santos pics look slick, the movie can be cheesy fun.

Starring Peter Cushing as Professor Van Helsing, a role he originated in the early Hammer classic Horror of Dracula and impeccably portrayed through a series of movie follow-ups (the best of which is Brides of Dracula), and Shaw leading man David Chiang, as one of seven brothers enlisted in a battle against an army of the undead, the movie opens with a prologue set in Transylvania circa 1804. There, a mysterious Oriental traveler named Kah (Shen Chan) makes his way to Castle Dracula in an attempt to strike a deal with the vampire lord (mincingly played by a heavily made-up John Forbes-Robertson: the least menacing Dracula this side of Jeffrey Tambor). Kah is a high priest back in China for a group known as the Seven Golden Vampires, though from what we can gather this gang is so bad at their job that the village they've been terrorizing has been rising up against them. The priest has come to enlist Dracula's aid to help his vampire masters reassert their rightful place, but the master vamp has other ideas. Grasping onto the high priest, he "takes on" the image of Kah (how this is supposed to work is never explained, but it involves a lotta fx smoke - and we never see the human Kah again), then presumably heads for China.

The film shifts to Chung King a hundred years later, where we see (after a nifty village milieu establishing shot that includes a close-up of a frog's head getting lopped off) Cushing's Van Helsing lecturing on vampires to a skeptical audience of Chinese academics. He recounts the Legend of the Seven Golden Vamps, which (we sharp viewers realize) is set in the same village that the high priest was talking about in the prologue. It is as Van Helsing recounts the legend that we get our first sense of just how different the Chinese bloodsuckers will be from Robertson's more familiar Eurotrash Drac. Wearing gold masks to cover their oatmeal-mottled faces and white buggy eyes, along with absurdly large gold bat medallions that appear to provide some sort of mystical protection (and are shockingly easy to remove), they hold up in a temple where they fondle and suckle on those half-naked village girls they keep chained in a circle around a cauldron of bubbling blood, while Dracula/Kah stands back and imperiously presides over the festivities. Instead of being burned by the crucifix, this band of bloodsuckers is susceptible to images of the Lord Buddha.