The British studio Hammer Films made a number of well-remembered horror movies for decades, often featuring Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing. And, quite frankly, I was curious enough to finally look one up. Granted, the one I selected, currently included with an Amazon Prime Video subscription, is something of an outlier, a movie the studio hoped would be the lead to a new franchise and style that combined the horror with swashbuckling action. That would be Captain Kronos–Vampire Hunter.
Financial issues made this one a one-off, but the movie has something of a cult following today.
Captain Kronos (German actor Horst Janson but dubbed over by Jullian Holloway due to his thick German accent) is a former captain of the royal guard with a new vocation: he hunts vampires. Vampires converted his family, and after taking them out, Kronos made it his mission in life to hunt down and take down as many as he can. He has a traveling companion/assistant in the form of the hunchbacked Professor Hieronymus Grost (John Cater), and shortly after he appears on screen, he’s rescued a woman named Carla (Caroline Munro) from some stocks, and she travels with the pair for the rest of movie, assisting as she can.
Special note on Munro: she was quite popular for various sci-fi and horror flicks for a while, often in skimpy outfits, and she was the only actor to get a long term contract from Hammer. That said, she never did nudity despite what she was asked to do, and to that, I say good for her.
As it is, a small village has a problem: something is draining various young women of their youth. It’s a vampire of some kind, and Kronos and Grost know there are many different types of vampires. It doesn’t much matter. If there’s a vampire, Kronos and Grost will hunt it down and kill it.
This was a lot of fun. The horror was often done right, and the action was suitably exciting. Kronos with a sword is a rather impressive sight, taking out three goons bothering him in a tavern with a single swing of his sword. There’s also a lot of good humor in places. When Kronos’s friend Dr. Marcus (John Carson) realizes he’s been changed into a vampire, he asks Kronos to kill him before he kills someone himself. That leads to Kronos and Grost using some trial-and-error methods to figure out just how to kill Marcus when a stake through the heart just doesn’t work. Anyway, this was a fun flick, worth a look if you want a different kind of vampire movie with a different kind of vampire and a vampire hunter that may have been a forebearer for similar characters like Blade.
Grade: B+
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