Someone - or something - is roaming the woods, ambushing young women and draining them of their youth. The local surgeon calls in an old army friend, one Captain Kronos. Kronos, who arrives with a hunchbacked professor (as well as some girl he randomly picked up in the woods) in tow, is now working as a vampire hunter, and quickly ascertains that such a creature is responsible here.
This isn't your normal blood-drinking, stake through the heart, can't eat Italian food vampire though. As the professor helpfully explains, there are hundreds of different types of vampire, each with their own powers and weaknesses. This one drains youth, rather than blood, and can be expected to be young and gorgeous itself.
The girl with Kronos is young and gorgeous, and in a smarter film perhaps she would have turned out to be the monster. But no-one, including the script writer, ever seems to consider this possibility. A shame. Instead we get a villain so obvious that I was actively disappointed that they weren't a red herring.
"Actively disappointing" might be a good way to sum up this whole film, actually. Leading man Horst Janson lacks the charisma to make the taciturn Kronos compelling, but I'm not sure many actors would have been up to that challenge. The script certainly does him no favours in that regard, and it misfires in a number of other ways too, frequently squandering precious chunks of its slender 90 minute run-time on characters and scenes that add little to proceedings.
This was apparently planned to be the start of a new franchise for Hammer Films, but the studio's money troubles sunk that plan. Based on the one effort they completed, I'm far from convinced we lost anything in not getting a Captain Kronos 2.
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