Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974, Brian Clemens)

Now Hiring: Assistant Vampire Hunters. Offering stake in company.

Inevitably, there are spoilers here, but I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum in the review half, enough that you could read it and still enjoy and be surprised by the film. Nevertheless, read with care. Thanks!

What is it? Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, written and directed by Brian Clemens, and starring Horst Janson, John Cater, Caroline Munro, and John Carson.

First viewing? Second. Last viewing was 12 December 21; before that, 2005, approximately.

What’s it about? Something is killing the young women in an English village, sapping their youth and turning them into aged corpses. Captain Kronos (Horst Janson), along with his buddy and scholar Professor Grost (John Cater) arrive to root out the monster, with help from a beautiful village girl (Caroline Munro). Could it have something to do with the haughty sibling aristocrats who reside in the spooky manor nearby?

What are your thoughts about it? There’s a lot to not like about Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. Writer/director Brian Clemens was a veteran of the UK TV series The Avengers, but you wouldn’t know it from the downright narcotized way this film flows from moment. Women are dying left and right, but it never seems like a particularly urgent problem. Everything feels like looking through binoculars the wrong way, and sometimes it’s more than a feeling — there are a number of shots where Clemens unnecessarily places the camera really far away. The Vampire aspect works well enough, but the Hunter part of the equation barely has a pulse; oftentimes, the swordplay, the big innovation the film is trying to bring to the Hammer vampire films, looks like it was rehearsed just moments earlier. Horst Janson… showed up. I mean, that is 80% of life, but that other 20% is important, too.

Captain Kronos has to think about his entire life before he can hunt vampires.

And that stuff made the most impression that last time I saw this, about 17 years ago. But maybe as I’ve aged I’ve become a bit of a softie. Maybe the movie’s unrealized potential means more to me now. Or maybe it was never that bad?

The Kronos quartet. (Please don’t click away.)

Regardless of the reason, I like it a lot more now. Part of it is, yes, the unrealized potential. One pretty ballsy thing Clemens does is jumble up the vampire mythos, throwing out all the old rules and inventing new ones. It reads as if Clemens rolled on a random table of vampire attributes and just went with it. (“Let’s see, they drain…” rolls “youth instead of blood and they…” rolls “can walk in sunlight, but they…” rolls “can get whammied by their own hypnotic gaze but they also” rolls “reanimate dead toads they walk near? Weird, but okay.”) Confession: I generally find vampire narratives dull and predictable. The idea of a series where every vampire is crazy unique would’ve been fantastic. (“These vampires drain people of water and have snakes that pop out of their bellybuttons!”) A genuine shame that it never continued.

One of the better kills in the movie. Very simple, understated.

This viewing was also the first time I realized how darkly funny the scene is where Kronos has to kill his now-vampirized friend Dr. Marcus. Since the rules change with every vampire type Kronos encounters, he has to try a several ideas, putting poor undead Dr. Marcus through excruciating pain each time. This isn’t a movie with a lot of great shots, but the rack focus from the noose to Marcus’ apprehensive face counts as one. The whole thing reminded me of, and this is a comparison I didn’t expect to make, the dybbuk scene from A Serious Man.

How many stars out of five? Three and a half. If I were handing out a star rating back in 2005, it would’ve been closer to two, I think.

Where can I find it? As of this writing¹, you can watch it for free on Kanopy, or rent or buy it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu, or Microsoft Store. Just previous to this writing, it was available on Paramount+, but appears to have left. Also as of this writing, it is available for free on something called Movieland.tv, which can be loaded up on the Roku. Whether it will still be there when you read this, or even whether Movieland.tv will still exist, I do not know. (ETA 1/10/22: It is and it does.)²

What can we take from it? Eagle-eyed readers of Against the ’70s may note there’s something off about this film choice. Yes, it was made in the 1970s, but a) it doesn’t take place in America and b) it takes place in the freakin’ 1800s³. Kent, you may ask, how can this movie be incorporated into your makeshift canon?

Well, it won’t be easy, because it requires me to create a new rules framework for the Cypher System, a system that is pretty light as it is, and doesn’t really need more rules. However, if I really want to get my vision for Against the ’70s across, I’m going to need to, if you will, bespeak for myself. Hey, it can’t all be making up numbers to describe imaginary monsters.

One imaginary monster I will not be describing with made-up numbers is this fake bat glued to this actress’s face.

Here’s what I need, or at least want: some rules for Patrons. Patrons, if you’re familiar with a lot of current rpgs, are exactly what you think they are: powerful NPCs or organizations that the player characters work for, and usually receive benefits from in return. One of the issues I have to deal with as I construct the Against the ’70s rpg world is focus. There have been (at least) two other 1970s-inspired rpgs before mine (Damnation Decade and The Spirit of 77.) What makes mine different? Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer for that yet. I’m still working on it. What I do know, though, is that a typical game of Against the ’70s revolves around Patrons. It is presumed that a group of PCs have been brought together to further that Patron’s goals. These goals usually (but not necessarily!) involve investigating mysteries and defeating threats to the world.

Captain Kronos has swords, he has no need for your silly game rules.

Do Patrons absolutely need their own rules? No, they do not. But I have a huge list of Patron ideas for Against the ’70s, and the idea of differentiating between them with powers and whatnot is irresistible.

The following rules aren’t complete. They’re barely even rules at this point. This is not only going to be a work in progress, it’s going to be a public work in progress. I’m setting out the orange cones as we speak.⁴

CAPTAIN KRONOS (PATRON)

Name: Captain Kronos. It’s unclear what his first name is, or if Kronos is actually his first name, or if the whole thing is an alias.

Want: To kill the Primum Lamia, ridding the world of vampirism forever.

Level: 5⁵

Backstory⁶: Captain Kronos was an officer in the British Army as part of the Third Coalition against Napoleon. Upon returning home, he discovered that his mother and sister had been vampirized by some supernatural creature. Attacked by his family, he was forced to kill them, but not before he was bitten himself⁷. At first, there seemed to be no side effects, and Kronos dedicated his life to the extermination of vampire-kind. However, after thirty years of hunting vampires with no change in his physical appearance, he realized he wasn’t aging. The bite had conferred on him, if not immortality — he’d come close to dying several times at the hands of vampires — then infinite youth. Captain Kronos soon discovered that, like the vampires he hunted, he needed to move every couple decades, lest his secret be discovered (and possibly mistaken for a vampire!)

Over the last 150 years⁸, Captain Kronos has determined that somewhere in the world is the Primum Lamia, the creature responsible for creating all the different strains of vampire that exist. Killing the Primum Lamia will kill all the other vampires in existence… or possibly restore them to humanity. Kronos isn’t sure which, but he also doesn’t care. All he knows is that he has grown weary of scouring the Earth for the monster alone, bearing the burden himself. Enter the player characters.

Personality: Captain Kronos is now around 180 years old, and has seen a lot of death in that time. When he was young, Kronos was incredibly confident, cocksure even, about his own abilities; this quality has hardened over the near-two centuries. However, any charm or joie de vivre he might have had has atrophied away. He has learned, the hard way, not to get too close to anyone, as they all die one way or the other. Captain Kronos expects perfection, and if you can’t provide it, he’ll cut you off and find someone who can.

Base of Operations: Captain Kronos has recently moved to Los Angeles, settling in the Laurel Canyon area, where the locals assume he’s a singer-songwriter. He’s attempting to find two vampires that have recently arrived in L.A.: Count Iorga and Prince Mamuwalde. He wants to interrogate them, then kill them.

Secrets: Every Patron has a number of secrets that, if revealed, could change the direction of the adventure or even the campaign.

1. He is certain that killing the Primum Lamia will kill him as well. He accepts this.
2. He has other teams working for him in other parts of the world. The teams, as far as he knows, have no awareness of each other.
3. He will sacrifice a team if it brings him closer to his goal.
4. One of the player characters reminds him of a cherished someone from his past. He will treat that character rudely, unkindly, but will also leap into action to save them if possible.
5. He has a jail or dungeon hidden somewhere in one of his many estates where he keeps certain individual vampires alive. Why? That’s for the GM to determine.

Available Cyphers and Artifacts⁹: Captain Kronos is a real taskmaster. So why work for him? Over the last 150 years, he’s learned how to make and keep an immense fortune, and he can give player characters literally anything money can buy, and can certainly do his best to obtain things it can’t. He’s also not going to leave his team without resources. Here are some things he can offer his team during a briefing, or possibly dropped off in the middle of a mission.

DUST FROM THE TOMB OF THE PRIMUM LAMIA (CYPHER - MANIFEST)

Level: 1d6

Effect: Can be used to create a line of rust-red dust equal to the cypher level in feet. Any vampire who crosses it will have their next action hindered by three steps.

PENANGGALAN VINEGAR (CYPHER - MANIFEST)

Level: 1d6

Effect: If sprayed in a vampire’s face (or otherwise ingests it), the vampire must speak the truth for a number of turns equal to the cypher level.

THE BUSOLĂ (ARTIFACT)

Level: 8

Form: A brass compass with magickal writing along the inside perimeter.

Effect: When opened, this device will point to the nearest vampire within a very long range (500 feet). If there is more than one, it will point at each one in turn. If there are a lot of vampires, it will look like the device is going haywire and probably have limited value. Also, don’t lose this or Kronos will be very displeased.

Depletion: —

Originally published 1/10/22 on Substack.