This is unabashed pulp, which has the same titling conventions as pornography. If you’re interested, you know it already. If you’re intrigued but on the fence, I’d add an adjective to the already unwieldy title: Captain Kronos – Swashbuckling Vampire Hunter. There. Now you either want to see this or you don’t.
But to keep our Patreon bumper from being directly under the article photo, I will say more.
Horst Janson stars as CAPTAIN KRONOS, an intrepid vampire hunter with a devil-may-care smirk and a luxuriant mane of hair. He travels around the country with his loyal sidekick, the hunchbacked Dr. Gorst, who stares at him with misty eyes and does all the useful manual labor. On their way to answer an old friend’s call for aid, Kronos rescues local hottie Carla (Caroline Munro) from the stocks. (She was sentenced to them for dancing on a Sunday, a crime that Kronos—apparently correctly—reads as code for “I fuck.” Why are the stocks in the middle of the woods instead of a town square? Don’t worry about it.) The trio then makes its way to the home of Dr. Marcus (John Carson), whose village has a whole spree of vampire attacks on its hands.
There’s a comic book-y feel to Captain Kronos, and I’ve never been less surprised in my life to learn about a (sadly short-lived) spin-off in that medium. The splashy colors, the bold visuals, the exuberant worldbuilding, the throwaway bits of backstory (complete with nods to wider Hammer lore), the deep bench of characters—this is an entertaining, if feather-light, movie, but it’s in the wrong medium.
Still, it makes do. One of its best moves is to—with a nod to its title—make its vampires not bloodsuckers but timesuckers. They attack with a kiss, dabbing some blood on the lips for dramatic effect, and leave wizened, aged bodies behind them. Kronos, again aching for a whole series of adventures, nonchalantly explains that there are entire taxonomies of vampires, and each species possesses its own unique qualities … and requires its own unique death.
That last detail leads to one of my favorite scenes, a blackly comedic sequence where Kronos and Gorst have to trial-and-error their way through the execution of a new and still almost human vampire. Yes, sir, I know you want us to kill you so your soul will be saved. But be patient: hold still while we stake you. Okay, now while we hang you, slowly choking you to death. We may have to set you on fire now. Yeah, I know it still hurts even when it’s not working. Sorry about that.
I mentioned the surprisingly deep bench of characters. There’s a manor that’s home to quasi-incestuous siblings Sara and Paul Durward (Lois Daine and Shane Briant) and their widowed, grandpa-was-always-the-best-with-the-sledge1 mother (Wanda Ventham). There’s a bar full of ruffians who will bully for pay and for pleasure. There’s a family full of pretty young vampire fodder. There’s a couple apparently doing some light ravishment roleplay out in the woods. I mean, you’ve got to get to 90 minutes somehow!
Only the Durwards are plausible vampires—the decadence and decay, the whiff of sexual ambiguity, the habit of making ominous proclamations about how they do not intend to grow old—but Kronos & Co. are, uh, diligent, so they while away their investigative hours setting up elaborate trip-lines they’re bad at monitoring, burying dead toads to see if a passing vampire accidentally resurrects them, and waiting until the last possible moment to intervene in any given situation. Oh, and fucking in some hay. Their biggest discovery—how to successfully kill a kronological vampire—happens by accident.
But it’s all so fun. For most of its runtime, it has good ideas rather than good execution, but the ideas are a blast—I love those dead toads! I love stealing a steel cross grave-marker from a cemetery to melt it down and reforge it into a sword!—and even the slipshod parts are charming. It’s a shallow movie, but it’s never aiming for depth. It wants to provide an endless stream of appealing visuals, scares, comedy, and swashbuckling satisfaction, and at that, it succeeds. And in its final fight, with Kronos using a mirrored cross blade to stun one mesmerizing vampire and swordfight another, it reaches giddier heights still. I was often incredulous, but I was never bored.
I’m sad I can’t watch at least six of these. I want to watch Kronos roll into a new village, show off his pecs, ineptly investigate a new kind of vampire, murder some punks, do a little dueling, and then leave a bunch some baffled, stunned survivors behind with zero explanation. Instead, Hammer Films shuttered soon after this was made, and Horst Janson went on to appear in a huge chunk of Sesamstraße, Germany’s Sesame Street. I’m sure a bunch of German kids were grateful and everything, but did they ever think about my needs?
Captain Kronos — Vampire Hunter is streaming on Kanopy.
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Three, Episode Three, “Harlan Roulette”
“You see, Wynn, that’s why it’s called organised crime.”
Classic Justified, really great episode – even aside from the violent episodic plot embedded within a larger drama and the funny explanation that Quarles’s gun frame is actually a pain in the ass, this is the funniest this show has been in a while. The thing about capitalism – and this very much feels like an episode sniffing around that thought – is that there’s always a guy above you, and the hierarchy never felt more obvious than it does here. Glen, our goon o’ the week, very much enjoys the power he has over drug addicts, but he also has (and, for the most part, respects even through hatred) Wynn Duffy above him, who has Quarles above him.
Shit rolls downhill; the lower you are on the totem pole, the less chance you have to be vulnerable. Glen can be as violent and cruel as he wants to drug addicts; they are at the whims of his annoyance or even boredom. Quarles can be as violent and cruel as he wants to anyone, because whoever he serves is currently out of the picture. Boyd’s scheme seems cool, but also aggressively naive; every time a big bad guy is taken down, there’s a bigger one they turn out to have been serving.
Biggest Laugh: No Art this episode.
BIggest Non-Art Laugh: “Who do you know killed people and got less than two years for it?” I have this reaction to a lot of bullshit statements like that.
Top Ownage: Boyd goes back to his preacher ways when getting the bar.
I used that “organized crime” line just the other day. Incredibly useful.
Love your point about Boyd’s naivete: he almost has a little bit of a Stringer Bell quality here where, as smart as he is, he doesn’t fully grasp the larger framework (and doesn’t realize it).
It’s such a great move by the episode to have the scene of him laying out plan – elegant, neat, convincing – and then go straight to Quarles laying out his plan, because we can get swept up in Boyd’s charisma and then immediately see his plan will inevitably have consequences.
Safe — Streaming Shuffle gets results! Quite good and Patton is great, I don’t think his decision at the end is about another person’s lack of respect but about their lack of recognition — the refusal to not blame others. The premise brings to mind the very famous ending of a certain Spike Lee joint and the tragedy here is that the chance can’t be taken; the tragedy here is that the chance isn’t understood. But who’s been giving out too many chances to begin with?
Hot Mother — not an Arrested Development episode, another misleadingly named Criterion short! And about a Kiwi mom and a daughter as opposed to Safe’s father and son and unfortunately watching this directly afterwards didn’t do it any favors. The two ladies snipe at each other on a trip to the spa and wind up in a sauna with a broken door, this is definitely a nightmarish scenario but it goes where it is going to and gets there, the end. Worth your 15 minutes but not much more.
The Wild Goose Lake — a man, a woman and a gun in 2012 Wuhan; the man is on the run with a bounty on his head after shooting a cop and the woman may or may not be here to help him. Diao Yinan’s noir is often very confusing, elliptical in dialogue and in flashback structure, there are lots of double crosses but also some relationships that are just plain unclear. But this is countered by how the movie feels like an actual god damn noir, nothing neo- about it, in terms of doom and yearning and unrelenting criminal grind — the title area is full of tenements and thugs and dingy noodle joints and an overwhelming atmosphere of suspicion. The intrusion of law and order doesn’t help things, the cops are almost all dopes who are running around with numbers on their side but no skills, no abilities other than the press of authority. Diao stages several gnarly action sequences as well as tense stakeouts and fakeouts; the movie is shot in color but its neon richness and heavy green tones are not noir’s chiaroscuro but give it a complementary miasmatic oppression. It ends how it was always going to end, unlike Hot Mother it is very much worth the extended time getting there. Leaving Criterion in a week, so get on it folks.
Woo, Safe! Agreed on the Spike Lee comparison: it feels like the kind of chance Patton would like to formally offer his son, but he knows in his heart how it would go (and that it wouldn’t really be understood or felt), and that makes it feel like not a chance at all.
I ordered X-Files DVDs when I cancelled Hulu, but it’s taking them a while to ship. So I’m a bit at loose ends at the moment, and last night was just a Scrubs double feature of “My Lunch”/”My Fallen Idol.”
Incredible John C. McGinley in these two episodes, and I especially love his vulnerable, near-wordless reaction to JD saying he would’ve made the same call: he’s past bluster and pretense in that scene, and McGinley’s face when those words land shows how much Cox really does respect JD as a doctor. It matters–but then a minute later, it’s not enough, and we get the most heartbreaking line of the episode, where Cox has run out of logical consolation: “He … wasn’t about to die, was he, Newbie? He could’ve waited another month for a kidney.” McGinley is fantastic in “My Fallen Idol,” too–in a mostly silent performance–but Braff actually has the best emotional moment there, as he comes to terms with the downsides of idolization and his need to get past it (“But that’s my problem, you know? And I’ll deal with that”) but still manages to find a way to use it to meaningfully reach out.
I am always very tickled by Todd embracing pansexuality in the same gross, over-the-top way he embraced what he previously understood as his heterosexuality. Good for you, Todd. High five!
I love Turk’s plot in “My Fallen Idol,” where he’s in an exciting rotation but can’t connect with the touchy-feely attending (who eventually gets revealed to be more and more of a bonkers loser, in some great comedic rambling); Turk is one of the only characters on the show who would be well-adjusted enough to self-efface a little (trying to get misty-eyed in front of said attending to sell his own sensitive side) but also call it quits after that, shrugging and resigning himself to an unhelpful rotation that he’ll just have to get through. There’s a kind of ideal combination of flexibility and personal integrity–not just in moral behavior, but in the sense of an untouchable, inviolable center of self–there, and it made me realize that I love Turk for a lot of the same reasons I love TOS Kirk. The names even rhyme, so the science checks out.
EDIT: Also, “My Fallen Idol” has both knife-wrench (“Practical and safe!”) and the “don’t smother your kids” PSA. Good job, episode.
I’m always a sucker for characters who are in problems that are just too big; Conor has frequently talked about Vic at the end of “Of Mice And Lem”, and the end of “My Lunch” catches Cox in a problem that is way too big emotionally, and everything expresses that so perfectly; the spinning camera, the continuous number of cases pouring in, and most of all, McGinley’s spectacular performance. I always remember his “Aw, no!” in the middle of it all when his beeper goes off again.
Yeah, the exhaustion of that “aw, no” is perfect. He just got a toehold to maybe find his footing again, and then you can hear his resignation to it crumbling beneath him.
Yeah, it’s the exact tipping point from “incredibly shitty day” to “my body cannot physically handle the stress of this”. I’m tearing up just thinking about it.
Joe Pera Talks With You, rest of season 3 – a slow, melancholy, funny ending to a show that does all of those things incredibly well. Thoroughly enjoyed revisiting this and I’m granting it a place in my highest tier of “comedy things”, I hope we get more Joe Pera on TV sometime soon.
Me too, a fine fine show.
Brain Damage – Few directors have a run like Frank Henenlotter, making a trilogy of melodramatic, sleazy, great NYC trash though this is the weakest. Aylmer is hilarious with googly eyes and that smooth DJ voice. But Brian isn’t as poignant as Basket Case’s screwed up killer and the kills feel more outright misogynistic than the other movies, especially the parasite fellatio. (Was in a screening of Frankenhooker with actual sex workers and they roared at the super crack making their screen counterparts spontaneously combust.) Still, the ending is unexpectedly mystical and even Lynchian, ending on a similar smash to black like Eraserhead that implies the overdose could lead to transcendence or maybe oblivion. Nowhere better to watch sometimes than Tubi.
Brian is a bit of a cipher but this makes him interesting in another way – he really is just plain hosed here, the addiction metaphor has no “one bite of the apple” temptation, right? But he still succumbs to it.
CALIFORNIA SPLIT–Perhaps the purest amalgamation of Altman’s aesthetic to subject matter. The wandering camera, use of natural lighting, and the layering of background sound lend a naturalism to a spectacle that insists on observational distance rather than fielding the characters’ subjectivity. It’s a picaresque buddy comedy, like any other bunch of relatively meandering journey based pictures of the 70s, set in various spaces where games of chance are played and hustles for fast cash go down, buoyed by the charisma of George Segal and Elliot Gould, lent several moments of gravity as the former goes through several bi-polar swings. Altman was a gambler himself, and, for what it’s worth, this is probably his most personal film, at least in terms of subject matter, and from my own remote experience, he does a great job of capturing the zany exuberance of the milieu and those caught in the allure of risk that casinos, race tracks, and backroom poker games promote.
That millieu is key to this, I like your note about observational distance and Altman’s grasp of the scenes makes it clear how much these dudes are just parts of a larger force driving them and their world while still not denying their individuality. EDIT and the force is created by people (and a few horses), right? The gambling rooms are not the airless auotomated spaces they will become, or the isolated inhuman phone apps they will become after that.
Year of the Month update!
Here’s a primer on some of the movies, albums, books and TVwe’ll be covering for 1973 in October!
Oct. 7th: Lauren James: Working
Oct. 22nd: Lauren James: The Wicker Man
Oct. 2oth: Sam Scott: F for Fake
Oct. 29th: Lauren James: Don’t Look Now
And there’s still time to sugn up for any of these movies, albums, books, from 1938!
Sept. 24th: Bridgett Taylor: Rebecca
Sept. 25th: Cori Domschot: Bringing Up Baby