Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)

The vampire here is a cloaked figure who lurks the English woods in broad daylight and whose bite turns pretty young girls into wrinkled old hags on the verge of death. On its trail is Captain Kronos, a square-jawed swashbuckler with a hunchback assistant and a mysterious past. Kronos is played by German actor Horst Janson who looks exactly like how you’d expect a guy named Horst Janson to look. When he’s not investigating vampire murders and fighting off interlopers with a custom-made sword, he’s settling down at night with beautiful peasant girl Caroline Munro and giving her a poke with his other sword. Writer/director Brian Clemens, most well-known as the head writer and producer of the old Avengers TV series, keeps things breezy and entertaining. This is less a fright flick than it is an adventure story in a classic Hammer horror Gothic setting. It’s a gloomy world of shadowy manors, rough-and-tumble pubs and rats that crawl through slimy dead vampire skeletons, but we’re confident that ol’ Horst Janson and his impressive head of hair will save the day.