A vampire (John Carradine, in his drunken stupor phase) travels through the American West. When he's hitch-hiking on a stagecoach, an older woman makes the mistake of showing him a photo of her daughter Betty (Melinda Plowman). Obviously, Carradinpire suffers from that old vampiric malaise, the wanting to make any young woman whose photo you see your vampire bride sickness, and "cleverly" arranges an Indian attack on the coach to kill the woman and her traveling companion, whose role as the "long lost relative from the other coast" he's going to assume to get into Betty's knickersfind eternal happiness with the true love of his existence.
It's just too bad that Betty has a fiancee - Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney), trying to live a new life without violence as a ranch hand, loved by almost every person of authority he meets (if they wouldn't love him, Courtney would have to act, and we really can't have that).
Billy soon enough understands (alright, is told by German immigrants who lost their daughter to Johnny the rubber bat) the truth about the kindly uncle and is most surely not willing to lose his woman to an undead guy with a goatee.
This is William Beaudine's sister movie to Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. It's just a shame that it is far less entertaining than its sibling. Where the other film wins the hearts and minds of right thinking viewers through copious amounts of glorious wrongness and a grotesque but loveable performance of its lead actress, Billy the Kid's adventures in the supernatural mostly fall flat. The whole vampire business here is realized as rote and boring as possible, never trying to do anything with the genre mash-up potentials of Western and vampire movie. It is most assuredly not improved by Beaudine's flavorless as usual direction, the eventless script or the godawful (in a charmless way) acting.
The film's theoretical star Carradine totters through it as if his vampire tended to only suck the blood of alcoholics, blabbering his lines and giving the same bug-eyed semi-Lugosi stare whenever he is told to emote, thereby reaching the elusive plateau of being so bad that it's just annoying. And yet, he still is the only thing I'd call even remotely memorable about the film. Unless you have never seen a rubber bat before. In this case, you'll also love the rubber bats.
In a sense, it is quite an achievement how painfully boring the film is, still I'd recommend you ignore the siren song of its title or its genealogy and just watch Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter for the tenth time instead. I wish I had.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment