Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter | Film Review

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter ***

by Eric Henderson on October 27, 2003 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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By the time the 1970s had rolled around, British production studio Hammer Films had been updating the gothic conventions of classic MGM monster movies by combining your basic musky gauze and ornate bric-a-brac with explicit gore and sometimes psychedelic splashes of color and movement. They also seemed to represent that last bastion of clear demarcation in horror films as to what represented good and what represented evil. In the late '60s and early '70s, moral ambiguity was the trampoline most horror films bounced their terror off of, and Hammer's unique brand of Neanderthal ethics were looking more and more like relics. (Also, an upstart studio named Amicus was turning out an endless series of inventive, fast-paced, campy horror anthologies like Tales from the Crypt and Asylum that resuscitated the wickedly funny "poetic justice" tales of the EC comics of the '50s.) Today, irony has started to look more and more like the death knell for serious horror films, and so the relative straightforwardness of a Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter is a welcome throwback. At any rate, and putting reactionary readings of horror fads aside, writer-director Brian Clemens's Kronos (though Clemens wrote hundreds of scripts, this was his sole helming gig) is still a fascinating blend of swashbuckling Renaissance Fair heroics and an un-traditional peek at the Vampire myth (these monsters steal their victims' youth instead of their blood). And even if the blend isn't exactly graceful, and if Clemens seems dead set on desexualizing his vampires (their quest for youth is not so much driven by their unchecked libido as it is by a pervasive narcissism), Kronos still retains that moody sense of locale that Hammer always nailed—the English countryside caught in a state of perpetual autumnal decay. Clemens's understanding of the vampires' desire to stay fresh and youthful can easily be translated into a lamentation for the (momentary) obsolescence of Kronos's own genres.

Director(s): Brian Clemens
Screenplay: Brian Clemens
Cast: Horst Janson, John Carson, Shane Briant, Caroline Munro, Joan Cater, Lois Daine, Brian Tully, Perry Soblosky, Ian Hendry
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 91 min.
Rating: R
Year: 1973