When Dr Marcus (John Carson), a medical doctor living in a small village notices young girls being drained of their youth, he calls in a old army friend of his, Captain Kronos (Horst Janson). Kronos bears the scars of his time in the army and of a vampire attack, which upon surviving he devoted his life to hunting vampires. Kronos is accompanied by Caroline Munro as the film's obligatory pretty girl and by his hunchback assistant Professor Hieronymus Grost, who acts the brains of the operation to Kronos's brawn.
The movie departs greatly from the formula used in Hammer's Dracula series in a couple of important ways: First, in the universe of Kronos, there are many different types of vampires each with their own specific strengths and weaknesses, and a major (and unintentionally funny) plot point of the movie revolves around the character's attempts to discover how to kill the vampire. Second, Kronos is able to battle the vampire on equal footing and the movies climax is an between Kronos and the vampire, both of them master swordsmen. Today audiences expect that of their vampire hunters, but keep in mind this movie was made in 1974 and Peter Cushing's Van Helsing was representative of the heroes in vampire up to then, and movie audiences expected vampire hunters to battle their foes by waiting for sunup and throwing the curtains open.
This movie stands out as one of Hammer's more creative vampire movies. The director of the movie (Brian Clemens) had wanted to do a series around these characters, but it never came to pass as Hammer was having financial problems by this point. If there is some parallel universe out there somewhere where the director got to film his Kronos series instead of this lone movie, I would give almost anything to be able to visit it long enough to see a Kronos marathon.
Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter IMDb
