Home Video Review: Hammer Horror Enters The 4K UHD Realm With Massive ‘Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter’ Boxset
by David Lewis
The iconic British movie studio Hammer Film Productions have entered the 4K UHD era in spectacular fashion with the limited boxset release of the 1974 swashbuckling vampire thriller Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter.
Written and directed by TV veteran Brian Clemens (creator of The New Avengers and The Professionals), the film was an attempt to pivot away from Hammer’s popular 1960s cycle of gothic Dracula films starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Kronos is, instead, more of a swashbuckling adventure film with vampires who can withstand daylight and fire. Also, they don’t suck blood, but instead steal their youthful victims’ vitality and energy. Luckily, they can still be dispatched with a well-placed stake, which is where Kronos (Horst Janson) comes in. The stoic samurai/gunslinger-type arrives in a 19th Century English small town alongside his sidekick, Professor Hieronymus Grost (John Cater), in order to rid the countryside of an apparent soul-sucking vampire, although he must follow the clues to find him first. It all ends in an epic climax featuring a rousing sword fight in front of a hypnotized audience of mortals and immortals alike. John Carson, Lois Daine, Shane Briant, and fan favorite Hammer regular Caroline Munro co-star.
Captain Kronos was meant to kick off a cinematic series, but the film flopped at the box office after sitting on the shelf for the better part of two years. It’s since built up a cult following, and offers a tantalizing glimpse of a different type of Hammer horror. The film drags a bit in the middle, and Janson lacks the charisma of Cushing, but there’s plenty of fun to be found — from the well-staged action to the stirring score by veteran composer Laurie Johnson, to the amusing tweaking it gives to familiar vampire lore.
Captain Kronos represents Hammer Film’s first ever 4K restoration, and great care and thought were clearly put into the film’s packaging and presentation. This set is absolutely packed with content, spread over two 4K UHD discs and three Blu-rays. For all the Hammer completionists out there, Captain Kronos is presented in three different aspect ratios — it was filmed in 1.37:1, cropped to 1.66:1 for UK theaters, and finally cropped again to 1.85:1 for the US.
The extras are just as thorough. There are multiple audio commentaries from various years featuring Clemens, Janson, Munroe, and others, plus new and vintage interviews and introductions from Munro, and Clemens’ filmmaker sons, Sam and George Clemens.
The centerpiece supplement is a silly, but very informative, recent visit to the Clemens household, where his family share memories of his life and career while giving a tour of all the props and promos he collected. They also highlight unmade scripts he wrote (including a spec script for Doctor Who). There’s also an exceptionally geeky deep dive called Anything Goes: Hammer Horror In the ’70s, in which two film journalists reminisce about growing up in that movie-mad decade and compare the studio’s output to what was being offered by Hollywood at the time. There’s also a brief featurette documenting a sweet-natured 2008 reunion which brought back Clemens, who passed away in 2015, and the majority of the cast for a big screen showing in London.
It’s all housed in a collectible, heavy duty slipcase with red foil titling and includes a lengthy, beautifully designed booklet with endless interviews, trivia, photos, and promotional images. There’s a second bound booklet reprinting the Kronos comic strips from the 1970s magazine The House of Hammer — including a fun sequel in which Kronos faces a convent of vampire nuns. It’s a shame the sequel only lives in comic book form, and never got the chance to unspool on the big screen.
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter is now available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray.
