Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974)
Directed by Brian Clemens

Film Review

By the 1970s, Hammer's popularity in the horror genre had taken a severe knock, thanks mainly to American imports which offered more explicit and original thrills for cinema audiences.  The company's attempt to timeshift its most successful asset, Dracula, into the 1970s - namely Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) - had not been a success, and so other attempts to reboot the vampire genre were made.  Some, in particular those involving semi-naked lesbian bloodsuckers, were (for some reason) a box office hit, but others fell by the wayside.  Two of Hammer's final vampire films - Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974) and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) - sought to capitalise on the popularity of other genres, in the first swashbuckling adventures, in the second martial arts movies.  It was a desperate bid for survival but time was against Hammer and these turned out to be the last twitchings of an already decomposing corpse.

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter was conceived by its writer-director Brian Clemens as the pilot for a television series, but the film's failure at the box office (due more to poor promotion than anything else) put paid to this.  Clemens had already distinguished himself as a screenwriter on an earlier Hammer horror film, Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971), a cheeky but brilliantly inspired re-imagining of Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous short story.  Clemens was better known for his work as writer and producer on the hit television series The Avengers, and the visual flair and colourful eccentricity he brought to this series is evident throughout Captain Kronos, the only film he directed in the course of his incredibly prolific career.

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter is an enjoyable romp, a surprisingly effective attempt to blend energetic swashbucker and traditional supernatural horror flick but it has two fundamental flaws which doubtless contributed to its failure at the box office.  Firstly, it feels too obviously like a pilot that was destined for the small screen rather than the big screen.  Clemens' expertise was in television and his film struggles to fill the grander canvas it is painted onto.  Had it been made as a TV movie it might have worked a great deal better.  As a piece of cinema, it lacks something.  More crucially, Clemens made a terrible blunder casting Horst Janson in the lead role.  Drop-dead handsome as the German actor is his lack of charisma and inability to speak English dialogue prevent him from being anything more than a lamentably wooden action hero.  Kronos may be good with a sword but give him a monologue and you'll be fast asleep before he gets to the end of it.  It's a novel idea though, a superhero who bores his adversaries to death.

Fortunately, Janson's lack of presence is handsomely made up for by the ensemble of acting talent that surrounds him.  John Carson, a ubiquitous face on British television for more than three decades, is excellent as the ill-fated Dr Marcus and Caroline Munro has an intensely sensual presence as the feisty heroine, a far cry from Hammer's traditional passive females, who end up screaming their heads off at the least sign of trouble.  Ex-Avenger Ian Hendry shows up briefly but is all too quickly dispatched by Kronos's nifty swordplay, getting what he deserves for laughing at other people's deformities, and Wanda Ventham, the main guest artiste, comes into her own as the most weirdly alluring of vampiric fiends in the film's wonderfully daft denouement.

Helped along by a cracking script and some really bad gags ('toad in the hole', indeed), Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter achieves exactly what Hammer intended - to breathe new life into its Gothic horror output.  Of the many set-pieces that enliven the well-constructed narrative the most memorable is the one in which Kronos and his supposedly know-it-all side-kick ('What he doesn't know about vampires wouldn't fill a flea's codpiece') attempt to kill, with breathtaking ineptitude, a vampiric John Carson.  When a stake through the heart fails to do the job, Kronos has to run through all the grisly alternatives until, by a process of trial and error, he finally comes up with the correct method of dispatch.  And he has the gall to call himself a vampire hunter!  It's nice to meet a hero who doesn't always have the answer and muddles through much as we do in real life.  This is Kronos' main appeal - he may look the part but, as a hero, he's a bit of a rank amateur, a well-intended fool who is just too full of himself to realise how useless he really is.  It's amazing he didn't take up a career in local government.

Film Synopsis

Accompanied by his hunchback assistant Professor Hieronymus Grost, Captain Kronos arrives in a remote village in search of vampires.  Recently, several young women have mysteriously aged to death in the locality and Kronos believes this to be the work of an unusual species of vampire, one who feeds on youth rather than blood.  Assisted by an old army friend, Dr Marcus, and a wayward young woman named Carla, Kronos set about identifying the vampire.  Their investigation inevitably leads to the house of Lord Durward, a friend of Dr Marcus's who died from the plague some years ago.  Is it possible that one or both of Durward's youthful children is the vampire?  When Dr Marcus is transformed into a vampire Kronos has no choice but destroy him - but how?