Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter

REVIEW
Labeled “the most innovative vampire film of the Seventies” by the book Ten Years of Terror, Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter was also one of the last great genre films produced by Hammer Studios in England. Their reputation created by the colorful Dracula, Frankenstein, and Mummy adaptations of the late 1950’s—films which made Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee horror fan household names—Hammer’s output had largely declined into repetition and redundancy throughout the 1970’s, but Captain Kronos remains a unique departure from this cycle, and it stands as one of the studio’s best. An acknowledged influence on such latter-day vampire hunter sagas as Blade and From Dusk Till Dawn, Captain Kronos chronicles the adventures of the film’s eponymous hero, a young swordsman who travels the countryside with his hunchback cohort Grost in search of bloodsuckers to exterminate; soon they pick up the beautiful Carla (Caroline Munro in her first leading role), and begin to stalk a vampire draining women of their youth. Writer-director Brian Clemens, in his only directing assignment, largely jettisons the traditional old-fashioned gothic approach of most period-piece Hammer vampire tales, in favor of an infinitely less creaky, action-driven style (the film owes as much to the western as it does the horror film), punctuated with ironic humor and inventive storytelling. Hammer didn’t have many classics of the genre like Captain Kronos left in them following this film’s 1972 release, making Clemens’ film an even more notable accomplishment in this studio’s history.