Summary:
A master swordsman and his hunchback assistant attempt to hunt a vampire that has been plaguing a town, with the help of one of its citizens.
My Thoughts:
Hammer Film Productions is best known for its run of horror films which started in the mid-fifties and ran through the seventies. If I’m being honest, I think a lot of modern audiences will find Hammer Horror movies to be slightly cheesy and melodramatic, but there is a lot to like about what the company has to offer, and I, for one, actually look forward to watching Hammer productions because they have the atmosphere of the Universal Monster movies- gothic and creepy- but they’re usually a bit more ridiculous in their plots, and the violent content is usually a bit bloodier, sometimes seemingly influenced by giallos and other Euro-horror.
I feel like Hammer films also came at a weird time of transition for the horror genre, so it’s no wonder to me that I rarely hear them talked about. When you really dive into the genre, you find that since the beginning the genre has constantly been evolving (as are films as a whole), and it’s in the sixties and seventies where the genre started moving away from more theatrical/gothic horror (like the Universal Monster movies- “Dracula”, “The Bride of Frankenstein”) and started to evolve into more diverse horror: psychological horror (“Rosemary’s Baby”, “The Exorcist”), exploitation films (“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, “Shivers”), giallos (“Deep Red”, “Don’t Torture a Duckling”). Hammer horror films can feel like bizarre in that their plots often feel like they belong in films from the 30s, even the way the characters act feels overly theatrical- so it can almost feel shocking when suddenly you’re confronted with a scene of torture or a random shot of a naked woman. The films, to me, sometimes feel as if they can’t really decide what they want to be- exploitative horror or theatrical adventure with horror undertones. While that sort of uneven, weird tone is something I actually really like, I can absolutely understand why most of these films have sort of disappeared off the radar.
If my opening paragraphs haven’t cued you into this yet, I’ll state it flatly: this movie is hokey and melodramatic, but it’s also a lot of fun. Captain Kronos himself is a bit of a joke, but the overall story is one that I found to be very enjoyable, filled with weird lore and a few fun twists.
“What he doesn’t know about vampirism wouldn’t fill a flea’s codpiece.”
Captain Kronos (Horst Janson) is a master swordsman who travels the land in search of vampires to dispel with his hunchback assistant Dr. Marcus (John Carson, “Doomsday”). After Kronos rescues the beautiful Carla (Caroline Munro, “Maniac”), she accompanies him in his quest to vanquish the vampire (or vampires) that have killed a number of women in a small town.
I’ve already mentioned a few times that I think this movie is a bit cheesy, so let me give some examples. Captain Kronos himself looks like a weaselly mix of Roman Polanski and a young Jimmy Page, and he acts like he’s the coolest cat to ever strut his stuff, which, in turn, makes him seem all the more ridiculous. There’s a scene where Kronos simply ‘naps’ in a kind of meditative position with a napkin on his face and Carla and Dr. Marcus do all of the work for him, and when Carla asks why Kronos doesn’t help out, Marcus explains that he has to save his energy for fighting… They build up Kronos to be a master swordsman, a man of peerless talent, and then when we actually see Kronos fight there’s practically no choreography other than swishing swords about while the quick camera moves and editing try to obscure the lack of choreography. Carla also falls head over heels in love with Kronos, to the point of laughability. What this movie thinks makes for an awesome protagonist feels incredibly lame and dated, and the way that Carla swoons over Kronos will have modern audiences giggling.
While Kronos is pretty lame, Dr. Marcus is actually pretty great. His character is a hunchback whom knows practically everything there is to know about vampires, and it’s his character that does most of the ‘detective-like’ work that is needed to hunt down the vampires. And though Carla spends a fair amount of her time pining over Kronos, her character isn’t all bad either. She’s got a bit of a rebellious and adventurous streak, and she’s a far more compelling character than our titular one. As the story goes on, Marcus and Carla spend most of the time putting things together, while Kronos just waits around until he has to swing his sword again.
Verdict:
This movie is kind of dated and cheesy, but it also encompasses a lot of things that fans of vampire lore will enjoy. If you’ve seen movies like “The Fearless Vampire Killers”, “Vampire Hunter D”, or even lesser vampire killer movies like “Van Helsing”, then you’ll know all the basic tropes that come along with films like these. This movie doesn’t do much to deviate from the vampire-killer formula, but then again, that’s part of the charm of this movie. It might be cheesy, dated, hokey, and silly, but it’s still a lot of fun and it’s got a weird tone you won’t find many other places, and that’s enough for me to recommend it.
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