Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966)
Dracula: John Carradine
And now for something completely different. This perfunctory, sleepwalking movie should not be as terrible as it is. Indeed, the premise and even the plot are sound: Dracula is in the Old West, and a recently reformed Billy the Kid, jealous of the interloper, returns to his criminal ways to gun down the Count. Slavoj Zizek says something about the act of paraphrase creating banality, but in this case, the paraphrase creates potential. It’s the execution that’s banal; Carradine at least has the excuse of having been drunk the entire time. Filmed in four days (or three, sources vary) by the legendarily uncaring William “One Shot” Beaudine, any flicker of potential was well and truly quashed.
A few surreal moments aside (such as Dracula, in full sideshow mentalist garb of top hat, floppy red cravat, and cape, announcing himself as “Mr. Underhill” from Boston) it just plods along from bad to worse, and not even “so bad it’s good” bad. I added this movie to the list for two reasons. First, I wanted to look at Dracula in the context of the Western, and I had entirely misremembered this flick from my misspent UHF-monster-movie youth. The movie I thought this was is the considerably more interesting Curse of the Undead (Edward Dein, 1959), which probably counts as the first vampire Western, a subgenre that encompasses the Iranian-American low-fi rebel flick A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), John Carpenter’s 1998 Vampires (an homage to Rio Bravo), and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (the best vampire film of the 1980s, a very good decade for vampire films). Watch those instead of this one. The second reason I included this movie is that it is, after all, still John Carradine as Dracula and that has to count for something. Thankfully, this grease trap would not be Carradine’s final outing as the Count. Pretending for the moment that his brief cameos in softcore disco flick Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula (1979) don’t, er, count, Carradine fans can take satisfaction in TV workhorse Glen Larson’s surprisingly decent “McCloud Meets Dracula” episode. Aired in April 1977, it was the last episode in McCloud‘s run; Carradine kills delightfully as the senile-actor-or-real-vampire villain. And given its cowboy-cop premise, it’s even sort of kind of (not really) a Western, to boot.
The 31 Nights of Dractober is a daily preview of a “first cut” essay on a cinematic Dracula. With added footnotes in German (and mayhap your comments and responses), it will appear in my upcoming book Thrill of Dracula, part of the Dracula Dossier Kickstarter. Speaking of which, you can pre-order a silver mine’s worth of hard copies of The Dracula Dossier Director’s Handbook and Dracula Unredacted from your Friendly Local (Bits & Mortar participating) Game Store or from the Pelgrane store and get the PDFs now!