- Director: Brian Clemens
- Writer: Brian Clemens
- Stars: Horst Janson, John Carson, Shane Briant
- Run Time: 1 hour, 31 minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/3n4YdJF
Synopsis
A girl sits in the woods combing her hair, and a vampire sneaks up behind her and hypnotizes her. The blood starts to splatter. She looks really old afterwards. Credits roll.
Captain Kronos rides into town with his faithful hunchback servant Grost. He cuts local girl Carla free from the stocks, and she goes with them. We shift to another girl, Isabella, walking through the woods with a vampire following not too far behind. As before, he has his way with her. She wanders home, but she’s gotten really old-looking.
Kronos and his group arrive at the house of Dr. Marcus. The girls did, in fact, die. Grost and Kronos are experts on vampires, and he thinks one of them is the culprit. They drain life force, not just blood. Marcus thinks they may be right.
Dr. Marcus meets Paul Durward and his elderly mother at the cemetery, and they don’t like him very much since he could save old Lord Durward from the plague seven years ago. Later that evening, Kronos and Carla have some naked funtime in the barn while Grost and Marcus play chess. Meanwhile, several more women are killed.
A stranger in town hires the ruffian Kerro and his gang. Kerro doesn’t last very long against Kronos, as he and his gang die in the very next scene. Marcus has a drink with Paul Durward and his sister Sara. Marcus comments that Sara looks remarkably young. On the way home, Marcus meets up with the vampire, but it doesn’t kill him.
Marcus sprouts fangs and attacks Kronos, but Kronos ties him up. Marcus killed the most recent girl in the forest, and he begs them to kill him. They do, with a small steel cross. The villagers know that Kronos killed their doctor, and they want revenge. Kronos draws his sword and takes on all nine of them. Grost forges a new sword made of steel for killing these local vampires.
The vampire kills the rest of Isabella’s family that night, and there are limbs and body parts everywhere. Kronos has a plan; he gets Carla to ask for shelter in the Durward home and then they’ll see what happens.
She goes in and they let her stay the night. As she sleeps, someone approaches, and… it’s Sara, who was the prime suspect all along. Except it’s not Sara, it’s Lady Durward, now young and beautiful. She admits that she’s a Karnstein by birth, and she has ways of never growing old. “Life begins again for me, and your father.” She intends to bring Lord Durward back from his “sleep” of seven years. It was him roaming around in the black shroud.
She hypnotizes Sara and Paul and tells them to remember nothing. Kronos, however, is watching from upstairs. He tricks Lady Durward into hypnotizing herself and then he fences with Lord Durward. Kronos kills both vapires with his steel blade, rescuing Paul and Sara.
Kronos and Grost ride off, leaving Carla alone in the village. “Where will you go?” “Wherever there is evil,” he says smugly.
Commentary
Kronos spends half the film with his shirt off, and he’s got to be the scrawniest leading man I’ve ever seen. Apparently Horst Janson’s German accent was so unintelligible they had to dub all his lines. You have to wonder how he even got this role.
The mythology of vampires is completely different in this one. How you kill them has changed, what they take from is different, and even their purpose has altered. At least Hammer was trying new things and desperately trying to make vampires interesting again.
It very much feels like a film made from a comic book, although in fact the opposite happened. The film did inspire a comic book series. It was also intended as the first in a new series, but it did so poorly that Hammer chose not to continue with the story. It tries a lot of new things with an old idea, but it just wasn’t good enough to make me want more.