Les sept vampires d'or

Christopher Lee tried to talk Peter Cushing out of doing the film, as he considered it to be beneath an actor of Cushing's status. Lee told Cushing that Ralph Bates was willing to step in and do Cushing's role of Professor Lawrence Van Helsing if Cushing did not want to do it, but Cushing replied that he thought the change of scenery might help his depression after struggling with his wife's death two years previously.

According to this film, Dracula has spent the 10 years between 1804 and 1904 in a remote Chinese village in an alternate form as the now-vampiric High Priest Kah; this contradicts all of the events from the previous eight Hammer "Dracula" films.

The cut U.S. version of this film titled "The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula" runs 75 minutes compared to the 89-minute run of the original uncut UK version of it titled "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires". Both of these versions were once available on the two now-out-of-print U.S. DVD releases of the film by Anchor Bay Entertainment (the first time as a solo DVD release in 1998 as part of one of their DVD series titled "The Hammer Collection" and the second time as a 2-disc DVD release in 2004 together with Anchor Bay's earlier and also now-out-of-print solo DVD release in 2000 of the film Frankenstein créa la femme (1967) as part of another one of their DVD series titled "The Hammer Collection Double Feature") and are currently available on the U.S. Blu-ray release of it in 2019 by Shout! Factory/Scream Factory. The cut U.S. version removes entire sections of the film's dialogue (e.g., about 50% of the scene of Van Helsing's address to the university students, about 50% of the scene of the soiree near its beginning, 50% of the dialogue between Dracula and Kah, almost all of the romantic dialogue in the cave) and also re-edits it in order to position various action scenes at its beginning. The opening 10 minutes of the cut U.S. version features scenes from the 7 Golden Vampires' attack on the village, an old man destroying the seventh Golden Vampire and the vampires rising from their graves that was taken from the end of it, all of which were then sloppily put together into one long and incoherent sequence. Some of the scenes in it (e.g., the 7 Golden Vampires attacking the village and taking off the clothes of two village girls) are shown three times, one of those times with the scene shown in reverse. The scene in Castle Dracula which is the pre-credits scene in the original uncut UK version of the film now takes place about 15 minutes into the cut U.S. version of it and it has been so heavily and horribly edited to the point that it is now completely incoherent and out of context. The purpose of the cut U.S. version was to highlight the exploitation elements of the film and remove anything in it that was not sex and violence - and yet the "good" sex and violence in it was shown at least twice! In the end, the cut U.S. version of this film has since become a textbook example of how NOT to release a foreign film in the U.S.

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