Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter

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They talk about how the bottom fell out for studios like AIP, Amicus and Hammer with the abandonment of US financial partners. They discuss the pull towards overt sexuality in an attempt to change with the tides and a new “try anything” mentality that led to an infusion of kung fu, bikers, sword-fighting and anything else producers could think of to get audiences in seats.

The acting is a highlight: John "don't call me Johnny" Carson gives one of his typically likable and neurotic performances as Doctor Marcus, Wanda Ventham makes a lovely villainess, and Ian Hendry has an amusing cameo as an obnoxious thug (how the mighty had fallen, though -wasn't he a star at one point?). There's also great lines aplenty and some nice choreography for the sword-fights. The Durwards themselves. Lady Durward is revealed to be a Karnstein by birth, but it's her husband who had a library containing books on witchcraft and necromancy. Just how deeply the pair of them were into the occult and life after death before Lord Hagen died of an inconvenient plague isn't touched on, any more than the reasons behind Lady Durward's sudden aging, fake or not.

What I want to lead off here stating is that I was disappointed to see that this is the movie that is credited as the start of the downfall of Hammer Horror during this run they had. It does seem that this movie has gained quite the following after that era, but that it didn't do the greatest in its time which is a shame. Not to play my hand too early, but I dug what this movie was doing. Despite its poor performance, Clemens’ first and last feature directed film remains a special breed of western-action-horror hybrid that is unlike anything Hammer had done before it. Clemens’ meticulously detailed approach coupled with Ian Wilson’s earthy, naturalistic cinematography craft one of the rare dread-inducing sunlit, action-horrors of its time. Add in standout performances from Hammer newcomers Horst Janson, John Carson, John Cater and studio staple Caroline Munro and the outcome is one of Hammer’s most entertaining and compelling rides of the 1970s. Incest Subtext: Strongly (and, according to writer/director Brian Clemens, intentionally) hinted at between Paul and Sara Durwood. In 1977, the producer of the Bond films, Cubby Broccoli, cast her as Bond villainess Naomi in The Spy Who Loved Me. In one scene, Roger Moore’s Bond arrives in Sardinia, posing as a marine biologist. Naomi, sporting a bikini and diaphanous peignoir, sashays to her boat, as Bond comments: “What a handsome craft – such lovely lines.”

Author/Critic Kim Newman and Author/Editor Stephen Jones sit down to have a candid chat about Hammer’s latter years and the huge output of genre films that came out at that time which ultimately made very little money.Earlier that year, her dad had dropped her off at Elstree studios to play one of Woody Allen’s gun-toting guards in the James Bond spoof Casino Royale. “We all wore chain mail dresses and gladiator boots. My mum was thrilled. She loved Woody Allen’s work.” Eisner nails the ruthless aesthetic of making a socio-political survival thriller in 2000s horror terms. There’s an unctuous malaise to 2010’s The Crazies that submerges audiences in a rural American nightmare. From start to finish, a sense of hopelessness keeps us on edge as David’s group marches towards their inevitable fates. Romero does well to represent the government as manipulative, incompetent fools who poison the country they’re meant to protect, which Eisner doesn’t need to do as heavily this time. Plenty happens between 1973 and 2010 that makes Romero’s assertions less and less fantastical, which lets Eisner lean into the utter inhumanity Ogen Marsh’s population endures as tax-paying collateral damage. But of course, being the all-round smart arse that he is, Kronos' greatest moments have to be his sword fights. In the first he moves his sword just twice to despatch three goons, in another he disarms every bloke in the village with his flashing blade, and at the climax of the film... but that would be telling.

Under scrutiny the low budget is evident, where bare minimum of set dressing for the interiors and extended exterior shots are a necessity, while you might be surprised to realise there actually isn't that many people in the story! But Clemens does a marvellous job with what he had to work with, really zipping it along and blending so many genre flavours with consummate ease. It's a shame this was to be his only film directing effort. He even gets sparky performances from his cast, managing to sexualise Munro without flashing the flesh and turning Janson's stiffness into one of the film's assets!And yet, such is the strength of Brian Clemens’ film, a movie that so purposefully diverges from the stylistic expectations of Hammer’s gothic aesthetic and story structure that it becomes something else entirely. Not beholden to any one genre, the film owes as much to John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) as it does Terrence Fisher’s Dracula, taking on a serial-like mentality and birthing a daring champion that could have gone on to fight any number of fiends, in any conceivable categories of narrative. On the other hand, John Cater is delightful in the direct supporting role of Grost, giving Kronos' assistant great amiable charm. Caroline Munroe, similarly, is obviously having fun in her role as Carla, and it's a pity that she's not given still more to do with it. The House of Hammer #1-3 (Oct. 1976-Jan. 1977), by Steve Moore and Ian Gibson [3] — a "sequel" rather than an adaptation Aristocrats Are Evil: The Durwards. More or less averted. While Lady Durward is the main villain and her husband likewise causes much of the supernatural bloodshed, she's actually a Karnstein by birth and he's been raised from the dead as a vampire using some form of necromancy, so might not be quite himself. For their own parts Paul and Sara Durward seem to be a rather pleasant pair, going as far as to allow a frightened gypsy girl to stay the night in their home without much in the way of suspicion, interrogation or saucy funny business, though there may be a reason for that. The writing and acting is a bit more of a mixed bag. Some members of the cast do their utmost to sell their parts, while others most definitely oversell it. One can at times see actors' process in the moment, leaning so hard into writer-director Brian Clemens' screenplay or direction to extract every last nuance that they go full circle and bury that nuance underneath their overt performance.