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October Horror Movie Challenge 2023 – A Post Mortem

31 October, 2023

The October Horror Movie Challenge

The reviews I’ve posted every day this month are my way of taking part in the October Horror Movie Challenge. Everyone has their own approach, but the main requirement is that you must watch a horror film every day throughout October. The only hard rule I had was that the films I chose had to be ones I hadn’t seen before.

I also took part in 2013, 2014, 2020, 2021 and 2022. You can find my reviews from these years on this site.

As much fun as watching all these films has been, talking about them is even better. If you fancy joining the conversation, I would love to hear from you. The main hub of discussion is our Discord server, where we have a channel dedicated to the October Horror Movie Challenge. Alternatively, you can contact me on Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or by leaving an offering of blood and milk beneath the old yew tree.

The Good

This is a tough category to narrow down. Apart from anything else, I have broad tastes in horror, and I will happily watch films from any subgenre or era. While I don’t get much pleasure out of watching terrible films to mock them anymore, I am always happy to make allowances for those that look dated or have painfully low budgets.

Also, my more ad hoc approach to selecting films this year meant that I ended up seeing far more than usual that I enjoyed. That said, while I liked a great many of them, there were only a handful that stood out as exceptional.

There are a few near misses that deserve special mention. In any other year, Something in the Dirt would have made my top three. Moorhead and Benson are long-time favourites of mine, and seeing them return to their micro-budget roots was one of the few good things to come out of the pandemic.

While I’m not sure I would describe it as enjoyable, Demon is a film that will haunt me for some time. Its mixture of Jewish mythology and the dark history of Poland is potent and unsettling. On the other end of the scale, both You Might be the Killer and Totally Killer were smart, funny slasher comedies made with a real love for the genre.

No One Will Save You probably surprised me more than any film this month, with its increasingly weird alien monsters and bizarrely affecting ending. And 47 Metres Down was certainly the most frightening selection, keeping my muscles knotted with tension throughout.

Brooklyn 45

This was a real surprise. For a start, Brooklyn 45 is far more serious than I expected from the poster and trailer. It’s also more of a thriller than a straight horror film, despite its central séance and subsequent ghostly manifestations. Largely taking place in a single room, it places its characters under increasing pressure, forcing them to confront the trauma and consequences of their wartime actions.

In the Earth

A few of the films I watched this year turned out to have been shaped by the pandemic. The fear of infection runs all the way through In the Earth, although this ultimately proves more of a transformative experience than a fatal one. Ben Wheatley draws upon the spirit of Nigel Kneale, giving us a film that mixes folk horror with science fiction, creating something trippy, imaginative and exquisitely British.

Talk to Me

As I started watching it, I was worried that Talk to Me had been overhyped. Barring a shocking opening scene, it initially feels like the kind of teen-friendly commercial horror film that plays things safe. As the story escalates, however, it moves into some very dark places indeed. This is such a fresh take on classic ghost story tropes that I ended up loving it.

The Bad

While I watched a fair few mediocre films this year, I don’t think there were any I’d describe as terrible. A couple tried my patience, but not enough to make me hate them. Even so, I should probably highlight a few as the weakest selections of the month.

The Banishing

I was in two minds about including The Banishing here. It’s not actually an awful film, merely a disappointing one. Christopher Smith has directed some amazing horror films, like Creep, Triangle, Severance and Black Death. If The Banishing had been made by another director, I might just have shrugged and moved on. Instead, this convoluted, derivative mess of a ghost story feels like such a shocking waste of talent that I ended up resenting it.

Older Gods

While I found little to enjoy in Older Gods, I feel guilty about including it here. This is clearly the kind of low-budget passion project I feel like I should be supporting, and a rare attempt to tackle the more philosophical side of cosmic horror. The problem is that it’s dull. Too much of the film is spent watching the protagonist sitting in a living room, passively consuming information that has been left to him by a friend. Such a promising premise deserves a much better execution.

The Gruesome Twosome

I think I’m done with Herschell Gordon Lewis. While The Gruesome Twosome was an improvement over the mean-spirited misogyny of last year’s The Gore Gore Girls, it doesn’t have much to recommend it either. This is a 72-minute film with maybe 20 minutes of material, padded out in a blatantly cynical manner. The few fun or weird moments aren’t enough to save it from being tedious.

The Weird

When it comes to horror, I like weird films. I’ll always take a shoddily made oddball over something polished but empty. This is a genre filled with enthusiastic filmmakers who often do their best with a budget that would barely cover a night down the pub. If a film shows me something I’ve never seen before or drags me along with its clumsy enthusiasm, I will love it forever.

Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell

As I mentioned in the full review, Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell may be the cheapest-looking film I’ve ever seen. The special effects are so gloriously amateurish that they pass out the other side of awful and become utterly endearing. Similarly, the acting and the script are so chaotic and feverish that you may wonder if you dreamt the whole thing. I cannot pretend this is a good film, but damn is it a fun one.

Murder Me, Monster

This Lynchian, Freudian nightmare of a monster movie is also dreamlike, but in a very different way. Murder Me, Monster is a polished, beautiful piece of cinema with an utterly deranged script. The supporting characters and dialogue are filled with captivating eccentricities, and the sheer beauty of the Andean locations turns the simplest scene into something majestic. If you watch this and wonder why I placed it in the weird section of this post mortem, just wait for the end.

El Conde

Portraying Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire is already an audacious premise for a film. That’s only the beginning of the sheer oddness of El Conde, however. This is an angry but funny attack of the grubby reality of fascist leaders and their self-mythologisation. But while El Conde is absolutely a political satire, it is also a perfectly accessible vampire story that goes to some very strange places indeed.

2023’s Selections

If you’d like a recap of the full list, it went something like this:

Dark August (USA, 1976)
Huesera: The Bone Woman (Mexico/Peru, 2022)
The Banishing (UK, 2020)
Brooklyn 45 (USA, 2023)
Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell (Japan, 1995)
Pyewacket (Canada, 2017)
Grave Robbers (Mexico, 1989)
You Might Be The Killer (USA, 2018)
No One Will Save You (USA, 2023)
The Sect (Italy, 1991)
Last Night in Soho (UK, 2021)
Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil (Spain, 2017)
47 Metres Down (UK/USA, 2017)
The Oskars Fantasy (Philippines, 2022)
In the Earth (UK, 2021)
Something in the Dirt (USA, 2022)
Blood Flower (Malaysia, 2023)
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Canada, 1987)
Older Gods (UK, 2023)
Come to Daddy (New Zealand, 2020)
Shrew’s Nest (Spain, 2014)
Totally Killer (USA, 2023)
The Premonition (USA, 1976)
Murder Me, Monster (Argentina, 2018)
The Gruesome Twosome (USA, 1967)
Talk to Me (Australia, 2023)
Gaia (South Africa, 2021)
Demon (Poland, 2015)
Juju Stories (Nigeria, 2022)
El Conde (Chile, 2023)
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Hong Kong/UK, 1974)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.

If you dig through the archives, you will also find episodes about a wide variety of horror stories and games. Happy nightmares!

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) – OHMC 2023 Day 31

30 October, 2023

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Hong Kong/UK, 1974)

I’ve got into the habit of saving myself a treat for the final day of the October Horror Movie Challenge. After spending a month writing daily reviews, I’m generally running on empty by this point. Having a film I’m looking forward to helps me limp towards the finish line.

While I’ve not been expecting The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires to be a cinematic masterpiece, it is wrapped up in nostalgia for me. I was born and brought up in Hong Kong, and my father was tangentially involved in the local film scene. As a result, Hong Kong cinema, especially kung-fu and horror films, were a big part of my youth.

I was only nine when The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires came out, and seeing it at the cinema wasn’t an option for me. In those days before home video, that usually meant waiting for a film to turn up on TV. I don’t remember that happening in this case. What I did manage, however, was to get hold of the tie-in LP, which retold the story as a sort of audio drama, mixing in dialogue from the film. While this might be a strange way to consume a kung-fu movie, I remember listening to it over and over.

Even so, the actual film and I never crossed paths until now. When I saw it pop up on Prime Video this year, however, I knew that this was my chance to do something about that. And so here we are.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is currently available on Prime Video in the UK.

Synopsis

We open in 1804, as Kah, a monk who tends to the temple of the titular seven golden vampires, has travelled to Transylvania. The vampires are losing their power and only Count Dracula can save them. Unfortunately for Kah, Dracula takes this as an opportunity to steal Kah’s form and head off to China to ownership of the temple. Even ancient vampires need a holiday every now and then.

Skipping forward to 1904, Professor Van Helsing is giving a guest lecture at Chung King University. The subject, unsurprisingly, is vampires. Ignoring all the actual vampire legends of China, he posits that there is a remote village in the heart of the country, locked in conflict with the legendary seven golden vampires, who more resemble the kind of European bloodsuckers Van Helsing is used to dealing with. While the sophisticated students laugh off Van Helsing’s stories, one attendee has reason to believe him.

It turns out that Hsi Ching comes from the village mentioned in the lecture. He has sought out Van Helsing, looking for help in defeating the seven golden vampires once and for all. Once a wealthy Scandinavian widow offers to bankroll the expedition, Van Helsing and his son join Hsi Ching and his siblings, each a master of the martial arts, to go and kick some vampiric arse.

We then embark on the longest cross-country trek since Lord of the Rings, filled with bandits, vampire minions, and burgeoning romances. Meanwhile, Dracula and the surviving golden vampires pursue their evil plans to rip the clothing off young women before draining them into their blood cauldron.

So will our heroes finally be able to put an end to this ancient evil? Yes, of course they will. This is a Hammer film.

General Thoughts

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires was a Hammer/Shaw Brothers co-production, shot in Hong Kong. It was directed by Hammer regular Roy Ward Baker, with additional action scenes directed by Chang Cheh. Apparently, the Shaw Brothers way of working was a shock to the British crew, but the production seems to have worked out fine in the end. Getting Hong Kong to double for Transylvania in the opening scene did make me laugh, however. The matte painting of Castle Dracula and the Carpathian Mountains over a New Territories landscape is one of the least convincing things I have even seen in a film.

While Peter Cushing once again stars as Van Helsing, Hammer clearly couldn’t get Christopher Lee to travel to Hong Kong for what amounts to a few minutes of screen time. Honestly, this would have been a waste of his talents. While The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is no worse than a lot of the later Hammer Dracula films, the count adopting another form makes the casting less important. John Forbes-Robertson does a fine job, even if he lacks Lee’s sheer physical presence, but his makeup is baffling. This Dracula looks more like a glam rocker who took a wrong turn backstage at Top of the Pops and ended up in Transylvania.

As I write this review, I’ve only just realised that the film never explains how Van Helsing has battled Dracula throughout his life when Dracula has spent the last hundred years living in China under a false identity. Maybe Dracula set up a franchise before he left Transylvania, selling other vampires the right to use his name. That even explains why he’s not played by Christopher Lee here.

The Rules of Vampirism

As I mentioned in yesterday’s review of El Conde, it always interests me to see how any vampire film reinvents the strengths of weaknesses of its bloodsuckers. While The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is technically a Hammer Dracula film, its vampires are really quite different.

For a start, we have Dracula’s newfound ability to steal people’s forms by consuming them. This seems like such a useful trick that he really should make more use of it. I quite fancy seeing a film in which he steals Van Helsing’s identity, like some vampiric version of Face/Off.

The golden vampires themselves are odd. Despite being local to China, they owe nothing to the hopping goeng-si or jiangshi of Chinese folklore, although some of their minions adopt an odd kind of boogie as they walk. While Van Helsing wonders how different they might be from European vampires, they seem to have most of the same strengths and weaknesses, even turning into rubber bats on strings at one point.

There are still a few differences, however. Instead of fearing the crucifix, the golden vampires can be repelled using an image of Buddha. Sadly, we only see this happen once in the film, maybe because Hammer were worried the audience would think it looked silly.

Each golden vampire is protected by a golden bat amulet they wear on a chain. If this is removed, they weaken and start smouldering. Sadly, the film makes little use of this.

Instead of a tomb, the golden vampires live in an evil pagoda atop an evil hill. Here, they maintain themselves by draining victims into a cauldron instead of feeding on them directly. The area surrounding the pagoda is eerily silent, devoid of bird or animal life.

The neatest ability possessed by the golden vampires is that they can raise armies of the dead by banging a gong in their lair. These vampire/zombie minions then rise from their graves, ready to be slaughtered in large quantities.

Verdict

How much you enjoy The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires will depend heavily on whether you like the cheesy end of Hammer Horror and the chaotic energy of 1970s Shaw Brothers kung-fu. It is, as advertised, very much a mixture of the two genres, with Gothic excesses interleaved with big, sprawling fight scenes. The result is clunky, ludicrous, and oddly charming. It may be second-rate as both a horror and a martial arts film, but it is undeniable fun.

While the makeup and special effects are primitive by modern standards, I was surprised at how gruesome some were. They clearly got a job lot of Kensington gore. The effects for the vampire deaths are classic Hammer time-lapse affairs, but a few look comically like balloons being deflated.

Unsurprisingly, the dialogue and most of the acting is pretty awful, but who watches films like this for the performances? The important stuff is the action sequences, and there are plenty of those. The overall pacing may be slow (it’s a Hammer film, after all), but it’s rare to go ten minutes without some sort of mass combat breaking out, whether against the undead, gangsters or bandits. It all plays out about the same.

The exception is the big climactic battle at the village, where plot armour is stripped away and central characters die horribly. This whole sequence is a glorious mess of blood and fire, moving at a breakneck speed. My only complaint was the way Mai Kwei, the sister, was quickly demoted from arse-kicking warrior to damsel in distress just to motivate the heroes.

If your taste in horror runs to amiable, old-fashioned nonsense, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires might be just your cauldron of blood.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Dark August (USA, 1976)
Huesera: The Bone Woman (Mexico/Peru, 2022)
The Banishing (UK, 2020)
Brooklyn 45 (USA, 2023)
Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell (Japan, 1995)
Pyewacket (Canada, 2017)
Grave Robbers (Mexico, 1989)
You Might Be The Killer (USA, 2018)
No One Will Save You (USA, 2023)
The Sect (Italy, 1991)
Last Night in Soho (UK, 2021)
Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil (Spain, 2017)
47 Metres Down (UK/USA, 2017)
The Oskars Fantasy (Philippines, 2022)
In the Earth (UK, 2021)
Something in the Dirt (USA, 2022)
Blood Flower (Malaysia, 2023)
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Canada, 1987)
Older Gods (UK, 2023)
Come to Daddy (New Zealand, 2020)
Shrew’s Nest (Spain, 2014)
Totally Killer (USA, 2023)
The Premonition (USA, 1976)
Murder Me, Monster (Argentina, 2018)
The Gruesome Twosome (USA, 1967)
Talk to Me (Australia, 2023)
Gaia (South Africa, 2021)
Demon (Poland, 2015)
Juju Stories (Nigeria, 2022)
El Conde (Chile, 2023)
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Hong Kong/UK, 1974)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.

If you dig through the archives, you will also find episodes about a wide variety of horror stories and games. Happy nightmares!

El Conde (2021) – OHMC 2023 Day 30

30 October, 2023

El Conde (Chile, 2023)

“This was what the count achieved. Beyond the killing, his life’s work was to turn us into heroes of greed.”

El Conde is another film that wasn’t even on my radar before this October. As the month has gone on, I’ve been craving stuff from the weirder end of horror, and El Conde looked like it fitted the bill. It’s a Chilean horror/comedy that reimagines the life of Augusto Pinochet as an ageing vampire. Political horror has always appealed to me, so I knew I had to give this one a try.

El Conde is currently available on Netflix in the UK.