The sword fighting vampire genre never really took off, but it wasn’t for the want of trying by this very enjoyable Hammer horror from 1974, a macabre swashbuckler written and directed by British genre legend Brian Clemens; his sole feature directing credit in fact. Clemens was a prolific writer who did so much to get TV audiences addicted to The Avengers, The Persuaders and The Professionals and it surely must have occurred to him that this trio of vampire-hunting leads could well have been spun off into a recurring TV series, perhaps under the aegis of Lew Grade.
German star and international co-production veteran Horst Janson plays Captain Kronos (dubbed by British actor Julian Holloway), a blond ex-army officer in a hilarious panto military outfit, roaming what appears to be a nameless Ruritanian-Transylvanian central European landscape (with a dash of Puritan England); he is dedicated to hunting vampires with his friend, the poignantly hunchbacked Professor Grost, played by John Cater. Kronos rescues a sultry young woman from the stocks, to which she had been sentenced for “dancing on the Sabbath”; this is Carla, played by horror icon Caroline Munro, and they fall in love.
