Have Stakes, Will Travel

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974) written & directed by Brian Clemens

I’ll have to admit that I wasn’t expecting much from Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter, but I was drawn to this late Hammer outing by the title alone. (It's the kind of title which somehow implies cheap science fiction and more than a little embarassment.) I braced myself for some sort of wretched excess, so when this film turned out to be a unique and classy film I was more than pleasantly surprised.

Captain Kronos (Horst Janson) is a Napoleonic officer who rides around Europe with his hunchback sidekick Professor Hieronymous Grost (John Cater) with a cart filled with wooden stakes and prepared to do battle with the minions of darkness. He’s like a cross between Zorro, Yojimbo and Van Helsing. The only thing he's missing is a boomstick. He even has his own logo and I swear that was a cheroot he was smoking there.
Kronos is called in by his old friend Dr. Marcus (John Carson, who played Secker in Taste the Blood of Dracula) to investigate a curious case of vampirism. (It's like Bones, only with vampires instead of David Boreanaz.)
The world of this film posseses a very rich understanding of vampirism. The idea here is that there is no single way to kill a vampire because vampires are understood to be a collection of many different species/types/variations, each with its own attributes and methods of destruction. For instance, the vampires going on a tear at the top of the film don’t drain people of blood, but instead steal their youth and vitality, so that the victims instantly age and die leaving behind bodies that look like old crones. Something is going terribly wrong here and that calls for the services of a professional vampire hunter.

Meanwhile, Kronos, on his way into town picks up a hot gypsy girl Carla (Caroline Munro) who is put into the stocks by some concerned citizens because she was dancing on a Sunday. Frankly, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be okay to see her dance any day of the week, but hey every community has standards and practices. Kronos, though, has the right idea and rescues her for which he will be adequately rewarded later.

The vampire (or vampires) continue on a tear while Kronos investigates the situation and we are introduced to the suspects.
An especially novel method of finding a vampire is Toad in the Hole, where you bury dead toads in boxes in an area and for whatever reason if one comes back to life it means an undead person has passed over it. This method leads to the discovery of carriage tracks that lead to the home of the Durwards. Apparently the 9th Lord of Durward, a friend of Dr. Marcus, died some time ago and his widow (Wanda Ventham), who doesn't want to be seen, hasn’t forgiven Marcus for not saving him and thus leaving her to take care of the two beautiful (and oddly attached to each other) Durward children Paul (Shane Briant) and Sara (Lois Dane).
Kronos, meanwhile has to deal with some toffs led by a man named Kerro (Ian Hendry) who are hired to get rid of him. Kronos (one part Zorro, after all) dispatches the hired swordsmen with aplomb and goes back to his main work of hunting vampires.
But not before having an extremely tasteful love scene in the stables with Carla while Grost and Marcus play chess in the house.
Marcus (Kronos calls him “you old leech-lover”) is eventually turned into a vampire unwittingly, but this gives him a chance to sacrifice his life so that Kronos and company can discover what will finally kill this variety of vampire. What follows is a hilarious series of bits I call 100 ways to kill your vampire friend. The experimentation is hilarious as Kronos tries everything and it looks like he’s torturing poor Markus. (Which causes the townsfolk to form a posse to go after Kronos because they don’t know what’s going on.) Finally, serendipity strikes. It turns out only a cross made of steel can kill this kind of vampire. Fortunately for Kronos, there is a cross made of steel in the town cemetery and he and Grost fashion the cross into a sword for Kronos to wield.
There are a couple of red herrings involved in the conclusion as Kronos heads up to Durward castle and has to figure out if the real vampires are the Durward children or the Lady of the house. He uses Carla as bait, very fetching bait.
It turns out that Lord Durward (William Hobbs) is alive and kicking (or, actually undead and biting) and going around doing some form of hunting in the night, but what they didn’t really know is that it was their mother all along. Lady Durward is a Karnstein by birth (whatever that means), member of an illustrious vampire family (with their own set of Hammer films). She mesmerizes her children and tries to take Carla's vitality but Kronos uses his shiny mirrored cross/sword to freeze her in place while he duels Lord Durward to death (or re-death) Lady Durward is then finished off too, leaving.
It’s unclear what the Durward/Karnstein kids will do in the aftermath now that they've found woken up from their spells and have seen the instantly decayed bodies of their evil parents. (Are the kids evil too?)
But Kronos rides off into the sunset leaving behind the girl (though he promises that he will think of her on his journeys). He'll think about her a lot, I'd think.

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter is a great vampire film and should be a classic, not least for some of the most imaginative thoughts about vampirism and its varieties. It’s refreshing to have a vampire film that doesn’t try to create a unified field theory of the origin of vampirism but is just about the adventuring involved in tracking down and destroying the many evolutionarily variegated species of vampires that are running around. Captain Kronos imagines a big rich world full of vampires and gives us an awesome hero to take them on. It’s a shame this film didn’t pan out into a lengthy set of sequels, because I could have done with 3 or 4 more Captain Kronos films to watch. As it is, we have to settle for just the one, but it’s a good one.

Special Features
Commentary with Brian Clemens and Caroline Munro
“Violence and sex should be taken off the screen and put back where they belong in the mind of the viewer.”
It’s great to listen to a commentary on one of these 1970s pieces that includes a woman’s perspective and isn’t just a pair of horn-dog old men.
Caroline Munro is a classy woman and one of the greatest of the scream queens and frankly not a bad actress all told.
We learn that Horst Janson was dubbed throughout the film, that there were 1300 storyboard drawings prepared for the film which was influenced by John Ford westerns.
Also, Caroline Munro had to spend so much of the shooting period barefoot that she was in pain for a lot of the time.
The commentary here is good and reveals the filmmakers to have been thoughtful and rather classy compared to the exploitation racketeers that are rampant in the horror biz.