Hammer/Paramount, 1974

Written and Directed by Brian Clemens
Produced by Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell
Music by Laurie Johnson
Cinematography by Ian Wilson
Edited by James Needs
Production Design by Robert Jones

Cast
Horst Janson (Captain Kronos)
John Carson (Dr. Marcus)
Caroline Munro (Carla)
Shane Briant (Paul Durward)
John Cater (Prof. Hieronymus Grost)
Lois Dane (Sarah Durward)
William Hobbs (Lord Hagen Durward)
Ian Hendry (Kerro)
Wanda Ventham (Lady Durward)

Reviewed by Ryan Harvey

Hammer Films intended from the beginning of pre-production to spin the character of Kronos into a franchise. Since the Dracula films appeared staked (Christopher Lee no longer wished to play the Count, and considering the quality of the last few films, nobody could blame him), the company needed a new vampire franchise to carry on. A young heroic hunter of bloodsuckers sounded like the perfect replacement. With Brian Clemens, writer of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde and the creative force behind the popular British TV series The Avengers, on board as both director and screenwriter, Captain Kronos promised the thrills and wit that would pull in a wider audience.

It didn’t work. The failure of Captain Kronos to grab audiences and save Hammer’s dwindling fortunes has little to do with the film’s quality. Hammer’s image as manufacturers of old-hat horror relegated the film into a niche in cinemagoers’ minds. The company didn’t help matters with its poor distribution that kept the film from getting much notice outside of the U.K., where it did receive some favorable reviews from genre critics.

Over thirty years later, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter rates as the most watchable of the late-period Hammer movies and has a strong fan following because of its unusual break from the formulas of the studio. Unfortunately, the film’s central idea reads better on paper than it plays on the screen. The movie is just good enough to make you wish that it could have been even better. Brian Clemens and Company do more right than they do wrong, but that still doesn’t qualify the film as success, only as an interesting piece that doesn’t fully follow through with the promises it makes to its audience.

The dashing but taciturn Kronos is a former captain in the German Imperial Army. (The screenplay doesn’t make the time period explicit, but it occurs some time after the end of a major war, possibly locating it after the Seven Years’ War, which concluded in 1763. However, as with many period horror and fantasy films, the location and era could best be described as “nowhere” and “nowhen.”) Kronos lost his family to a vampire attack, and now he roams the lands seeking to destroy the foul creatures wherever he finds them. To assist him in his task he has Professor Hieronymus Grost, a hunchback who serves as his armorer, gadgeteer, and font of vampiric knowledge. Kronos and Grost discover a new strain of vampires stalking the countryside who drain youth instead of blood, and they have taken a liking to young local girls. In his fight against the youth-stealing undead, Kronos pools the additional aid of a beautiful gypsy girl, Carla, whom he rescued from the stocks, and his old friend Dr. Marcus. Suspicion falls on the manor house family of the Durwards, whose two young scions Paul and Sara have a feverish desire to maintain their youth because of their disgust with their ailing, aged widow mother.

Caroline Munro’s Carla, on the other hand, is a rare case of a character who serves little purpose in the story but works regardless. Her exotic beauty and liveliness contrasts with the other grim characters and the dour Western European setting, and she has enough sex appeal for three movies. The rest of the cast consists of solid British actors who make a good go at the material, most notably Lois Daine as the androgynous Sara Durward and Ian Hendry (whom Clemens worked with on the first season of The Avengers) as a swaggering assassin who faces Kronos in a tavern confrontation pulled right out of the Italian Western playbook.

Clemens consciously subverts many of the clichés of the vampire genre, in particular the ones common to Hammer films. His vampires do not have one standard attack method or weakness, but instead have idiosyncratic strains and species, which makes Kronos’s job doubly difficult. The vampires he encounters in the movie drain youth from their victims, and the standard “wooden stake through the heart” dispatch method does nothing to them. In the film’s most memorable scene—both funny and grotesque at the same time—Kronos and Professor Grost tie up a recent vampirization victim and run the gamut of killing methods on him to see which one will work. Wooden stake? No. Hanging? No. What else we got…

But for all of Clemens’s toying with the boilerplate vampire myth, far too much of the film still has the standard gothic horror movie look and pacing: angry villagers, young buxom lasses chased into dark woods, a sinister rich family with a secret. Here’s where the innovative swashbuckling approach, emphasizing action and bravado over fear and terror, could make all the difference. However, the swashbuckling action isn’t consistent. The final swordfight gives the movie a good send-off, and a scene where Kronos takes on an enraged mob in a graveyard provides the film’s most striking tableaux as the hero disarms his opponents one at a time and their discarded swords jut up from the ground like metal weeds. But the movie still doesn’t go far enough with flashing steel and often feels staid. The budget may have something to do with this; with twice the money on hand, Captain Kronos might have really bloodied its hands with swinging swordplay. The strongest swashbuckling element in the film is the robust score by Laurie Johnson, who also composed the theme for The Avengers. The score goes against the grain of the heavy Hammer musical style established by James Bernard in the 1950s and brings a great vivaciousness to many of the scenes.

For the lover of fantasy literature, the movie has an additional pleasure. If ever a film approached capturing the feeling of Robert E. Howard’s stories of fighting puritan Solomon Kane, Captain Kronos is it. Many observant pulp readers noticed peculiar similarities between Solomon Kane and the 2004 flat-liner Van Helsing; but aside from some poses and the central idea, Steven Sommers’s by-the-numbers horror adventure has no trace of Howard’s style. Captain Kronos, on the other hand, feels exactly like something Howard could have written in the early 1920s if another magazine had asked him for stories similar to his Solomon Kane tales. I can imagine the Texas author retooling the puritanical Kane into a more dashing figure like Captain Kronos and sending him on his way into a series of rattling action-horror tales. Kronos is a jauntier figure with a greater taste for the earthy pleasures in life, but the world he moves through and his methods of dealing stone coldly with otherworldly and demonic menaces bears a strong resemblance to Solomon Kane’s.

In the three decades since the premiere of Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, the vampire slayer has turned into one of the standards of the action-horror genre. Captain Kronos might have had a creaky start, but it was ahead of its time. With the movie technology available today, it is one of the few of the old cult horror films that would actually benefit from getting remade. If a sympathetic director and writer took the reins and fixed the problems of the original film while keeping all its strengths, a new movie with Captain Kronos has the potential to do correctly everything that was done incorrectly in Van Helsing. I’d stake my undeath on it.