The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

The gist of this moving picture?

Dracula becomes a chinese man, and travels to a remote village in central China. Van Helsing, of course, just happens to be there, lecturing about vampires. Great martial arts battles ensue, until the final confrontation.

Musical check: No song and dance segment in sight.

The story so far:

Dracula still lives, even after he was defeated by Van Helsing.

Wait, wait, he actually looks like this (and he's traveling straight from Transylvania to China)

This is unknown to Dr. Van Helsing, who is currently also in China, lecturing about the connections between western and asian vampires, to an audience that isn't even amused...

All except one man, Hsi Ching, who, with his band of brothers (and sister), each one a master of one classical chinese weapon, seeks the vampire killer's help to save their ancestral village (surprise, the same one Dracula is taking a vacation to).

Said village is terrorized by seven vampires, who drink the blood of young ladies to survive, though the death of one spurs the brothers to look for Van Helsing

So there are seven vampires (now six), and then Dracula comes into the mix... so there's actually eight total in the film. I want my money back.

They're also followed by a scandinavian princess (who financed the expedition), and Van Helsing's son

Even so, all the action is carried out by the chinese siblings.

A rich princess that travels the world looking for thrills... It's an interesting concept, but it's just used so she can be a damsel in distress. Since it's a martial arts movie, it'd have been cool if she had some sort of fighting style, or if she somehow picked up some kung fu fans, and she was naturally good at them because of her blue blood (or something). She's an otherwise kind of useless character, but the concept has a lot of potential (and in real life, there's no way a princess like this wouldn't have some form of protection).

The rest is fighting, traveling, fighting. The meat of this stew, so to speak. And there's not much else that can be said about it. It's good choreography, some lighthearted murder and banishing of undead legions.

This is my first Van Helsing movie, so maybe it's a little out of order in the general Dracula canon, but...

It almost feels like they followed along symbolically, more than anything. That is, Van Helsing is just there on the side, while the martial arts gang fights. His advice to the brothers on how to face vampires is only this: "stake through the heart or silver weapons. Fire might help too".

Also, this is more or less the extent to which we see our hero fight

This version of Van Helsing is actually the classical depiction of him, a more traditional Victorian gentleman, but quite different from the modern Van Helsing I expected to see.

The pacing was quite fast, which is inevitable, since the movie's runtime is 85-ish minutes. I feel like it'd be a nicer read as a 200 page pulp novel.

Final score: 7/10. It's quite a good movie, speaking as someone who watches no movies at all, except when the IRC fellows host one.