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CAPTAIN KRONOS – VAMPIRE HUNTER
Rating: 
UK. 1972.
Director/Screenplay – Brian Clemens, Producers – Clemens & Albert Fennell, Photography – Ian Wilson, Music – Laurie Johnson, Makeup – James Evans, Production Design – Robert Jones. Production Company – Hammer.
Cast:
Horst Janson (Captain Kronos), John Cater (Professor Hieronymous Grost), Caroline Munro (Carla), John Carson (Dr Marcus), Shane Briant (Paul Durward), Lois Daine (Sara Durward), Ian Hendry (Kerro), Wanda Ventham (Lady Durward)
Plot: The master swordsman Captain Kronos and the hunchbacked Professor Hieronymous Grost are professional vampire hunters. At the invitation of their old friend Dr Marcus, they travel to the village of Durward to investigate a series of vampire killings. But Marcus becomes infected by a vampire’s bite and they are forced to kill him. The source of the killings eventually leads to the aging Lady Durward in her mansion overlooking the village.
This Hammer film was the directorial debut (indeed only film as director) of screenwriter Brian Clemens. Clemens is an interesting figure within the British television industry. Clemens first became known for his scripts for The Avengers (1962-9) then went onto produce the underrated The New Avengers (1976-8) and create the great The Professionals (1977-83) and the techno-thriller series Bugs (1995-8). He had also contributed screenplays to genre films such as See No Evil/Blind Terror (1971), Hammer’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Disney’s The Watcher in the Woods (1980) and, ahem, Highlander II: The Quickening (1991).
Captain Kronos an interesting effort despite the fact it doesn’t fully make it. It was made at a period when Hammer had fairly much milked the vein of its Dracula sequels dry and was starting to experiment with the vampire film – updating Dracula to the present – Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), combining Dracula with martial arts – The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) – and creating the likes of its lesbian sex vampire Karnstein trilogy beginning with The Vampire Lovers (1970), as well as other interesting entries like Vampire Circus (1972).
With Captain Kronos, Clemens ingeniously combines the Hammer vampire film with the Errol Flynn-type swashbuckler. It’s a unique and original idea – indeed one that Hammer had hoped to spin out into a series. Clemens fills it with striking images, such as the hero going into battle with a sword smelted out of a crucifix and a mirrored visor to reflect the vampire’s hypnotic gaze. And some of Clemens’s vampire mythology adds a sense of old wives tales and folk mythology to classical lore with quite intriguing results. There’s a fine scene where the two heroes find their friend has become infected and attempt various methods, including hanging, burning and impalement, to kill him.
But Clemens’s direction is often uneven in other places – some scenes work very well, but others such as the fight in the graveyard and several of the vampire attacks remain strangely stodgy. The playing of hero Horst Janson is very wooden. Overall the attempt fails to fully take off. If Clemens had been able to take full flight as an action director, this would have been a classic. Even so it remains one of the most fascinating efforts to emerge from the latter days of the Hammer cycle.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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