Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)
February 3, 2025 4:12 AM - Subscribe

[TRAILER] Debonair supernatural expert Captain Kronos (Horst Janson) and his hunchbacked assistant, Grost (John Cater), meet their match when they encounter a village where vampires have been stealing the vitality of young women, leaving them elderly and decrepit. Armed with his sword and formidable deductive reasoning, Kronos begins to solve the macabre mystery, with evidence pointing to the aristocratic Lady Durward (Wanda Ventham) and her family as prime suspects. This was intended as the first in a series for Hammer Films.

Also starring Caroline Munro, John Carson, Shane Briant, Lois Daine, Ian Hendry.

Written and directed by Brian Clemens. Produced by Albert Fennell, Brian Clemens for Hammer Film Productions. Cinematography by Ian Wilson. Edited by James Needs. Music by Laurie Johnson.

Average rating of 3.2/5 on Letterboxd.

Currently streaming in the US on Kanopy. Check streaming options for your favorites services and location on the film's JustWatch listing.
posted by DirtyOldTown (4 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
As a movie, this is solid. You can see how they could have gotten a series out of it.

It is dated, though with the Captain being the kind of counterculture-influenced hero who has excellent hair and saves the maidens, but also definitely has sex with them and is a little rough about it (though they point out that they like it).

It's just sort of missing the big twist or over-the-top set piece that would have put butts in seats enough that this could have had the momentum to launch the series.

As a re-release though, it's good work. This movie has been re-issued in the first boutique style blu ray release of which I am aware that has come direct from Hammer themselves. And daaaaaaang, they poured it on. There are 4K restorations of the original unmasked 1.33 to 1 edit, the 1.66 to 1 UK widescreen and the 1.85 to 1 US widescreen. Then the same over in Blu Ray. Plus intros from the stars, multiple commentaries, documentaries, interviews, posters, art cards, a graphic novel version of the story with sequel, a book of accompanying writing/essays. It's loaded.

If you're interested in Hammer of the era, the presentation of the new edition elevates the thing enough that you can get lost in it for a while, even though the film is merely good and not great.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:22 AM on February 3 [2 favorites]


I liked it when I was kid but I'm not sure how I'd feel about it now. My memory of it is that it has such a weird vibe compared the other Hammer films from the time. Maybe all that location shooting? It definitely needed a third act set piece to elevate the film. But yeah very much of its time. I look forward to checking out this new print at some point.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:14 AM on February 3 [1 favorite]


I watched this two years ago. The setting and imagery were very Hammeresque, but the main character does feel like an outlier, as DoT says a hero in search of TV series. Not bad, but the film tries just a bit too hard to prove he's cool.

The fact that this was a swashbuckling movie in which most fights lacked both swashes and buckles led to perhaps the best Ask thread I created, in which I wondered the what caused so many old fight scenes to lack oomph. The graveyard fight, where Kronos defeats six townsfolk, is especially memorable in being an anticlimax: You know it was imagined in the script as an awesome fight to establish the incredible skill of Kronos, but it feels like they looked at raw footage and just gave up on it. My take away from that thread and its links was that choreographing and filming big fights is just hard and expensive, you need lots of trained stuntmen and lots of rehearsals.

But the the final fight actually works, it's basically a 1:1 stage fight.
posted by mark k at 7:20 PM on February 3 [2 favorites]


Your breakdown in that other thread is really spot-on. The fights and set pieces are the weak point. That final fight is solid, but hardly up to being the high point of the film, and the film doesn't have much else to offer.

The one that rankled me was the big setup for a fight in the pub with Kerro and his two lackeys, which ended up all happening unseen. I guess they thought they were setting him up as such a badass he barely needed to bother, but it was a missed opportunity.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:08 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]


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