It was something I originally wrote about back in late 2012 but last night I revisited that 1974 Hammer movie, and my thought are below:
A (Letterboxd) mutual’s recent review of this movie inspired me to finally revisit this after having only seen this once in October of 2012 (I have record of this elsewhere from even before I joined Letterboxd a few months later) and the original review I had up was incredibly brief. Giving this a second viewing has been in the back of my mind for awhile; I finally got the proverbial kick in the arse to check out a movie late in the life of Hammer Studios that if fate had been different would have been one of several pictures starring the titular vampire hunter, his sidekick hunchbacked professor HIERONYMUS GROST and Caroline Munro, playing what’s known now as a Romani person as many people say that “Gypsy” is a slur.
This movie can also be called swashbuckling, as Kronos used to be in the military and often uses a sword. This is undoubtedly a different take on vampires. After all, the movie notes that there are “many different species of vampire” and the ones presented here drain young women of their youth instead of their blood. The wacky duo of Kronos and Grost take their time and do experiments to see if it’s even vampirism before going in guns-blazing. That doesn’t mean that we don’t see our hero as a badass… for example, he can take out several men in a tavern with just one swing.
While I’m not as over the moon for the movie the second time, it was still pretty good and a fresh take on a genre that can be a blast but is full of cliché. It would have been nice to see Horst Janson, John Cater and Munro on further adventures where they encounter all sorts of vampires (not just the ones depicted here in rural England full of woods and small pastoral villages) in a variety of old locations, but alas… perhaps those would have explained some of the non-sequitor moments presented here. That includes one woman in the tavern who had no lines of dialogue, was always blindfolded as if she stepped off the set of Bird Box Barcelona and never even referred to by the other characters...
One last note: it was only via perusal of a review written by someone I don’t follow on Letterboxd to realize that at the end, a character references another Hammer movie (actually, three) also about vampires; I’ll be vague on purpose for now but when it is time for Spooky Season and much horror will be viewed by me, that may be a path I go down.
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