Stakeout: "Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter"

If cinemas are going to have to rely on reissues while we wait for the pandemic, strike and now wildfire-slowed movie machine to return to something like its former speed, far better our screens be filled with off-piste titles, rather than the same small handful of crowd favourites we've all seen ten times over. Given the current ascendancy of horror at the box office, it's also very shrewd for Hammer to offer renewed access to less familiar titles from its storied back catalogue - not least as any profits can presumably be funnelled back into the revived studio's 21st century endeavours. First up for reassessment: 1974's Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, overseen by Brian Clemens in the pause between TV's The Avengers and The New Avengers, and a film that spliced classic Hammer tropes with elements of Richard Lester's then-popular Musketeers films, and possibly even something of Bergman's The Seventh Seal in its central clash. Horst Janson plays the titular Army officer, a dashing, blond-haired figure of enlightenment whose trajectory across the greener stretches of the Home Counties intersects with that of a far darker force: a cowled figure who turns the wildlife he or she passes through to rot and is introduced dispatching several fair, white-gowned maidens by aging them irrevocably. Cue swashbuckling, vamp-slaying and one moment of pure early Seventies ripeness - so ripe, indeed, you half-wonder whether Clemens handed the day's directorial duties over to one Dean Learner. "I'll stay if you'll have me," simpers Kronos's glamorous assistant Caroline Munro, a former dancing girl the Captain has liberated from the stocks with one flash of his mighty sword. "Oh, I'll have you," our hero parries, followed by an overemphatic crash-zoom onto Munro's expectant features, so thrustingly phallic that the camera may as well have been mounted on our hero's manhood. Boiiiiiiingggggggg!!!

Mostly, the film rattles along. Just 90 minutes from pillar to post, worldbuilding without fuss, it finds room for post-Wicker Man folk-horror eccentricity (toads as vampire motion detectors!) while sketching in a variety of intriguing narrative backroads and byways: Ian Hendry in leather trousers as a rival swordsman who gets all his scenes done on the one alehouse set (textbook Hammer efficiency), Wanda Ventham (Benedict Cumberbatch's mum) as a shadowy lady of the manor. Its flaw is that it never really develops beyond this initial sketchiness. We were closer to the Three-Day Week than we were to Hammer's golden era, and audiences who'd just been terrified by the expensive Hollywood horror revival of The Exorcist could have been forgiven for finding this throwback on the cheap side. Clemens arrives at terrific isolated images - a bloodied hand piercing the frame, Carrie-like, from below; eyes reflected in a sword; faces turned to death masks; some very Bergman-ish crucifixion shadowplay - but they tend to rattle around inside devil-may-care storytelling. Janson, the German actor who would have been semi-familiar to audiences of the time from roles in The McKenzie Break and Murphy's War, is a princely, sporting presence - a James Hunt on horseback - who equips himself well in the action scenes, but we're barely introduced to the character before he rides off into the sunset again. Intended to launch a series, the film's commercial failure instead helped put a stake through Hammer's heart - but it wouldn't surprise me if someone associated with the company still entertains hopes of picking up where Clemens' blueprint left off.

Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow; a limited edition 4K collector's edition Blu-ray is available from January 27.