If I were walking
alone at night and was confronted by a reedy old man dressed like a
magician who made a googly-eyed frown at me before his head lit up
bright orange from within like a lantern, it'd surely give me night
terrors for the rest of my life. In a movie? Not so much. (edit: this happens in most of the aged prints available, though I've now seen a restored print: the original effect is a more subdued red glow, making it one of the few reasonable elements of the movie.)
In more ways than
one Billy the Kid vs. Dracula channels Universal's omnibus classic
monster mash-ups of the 40's (Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, House
of Dracula and the like). No matter how bad the movie, audiences
found the prospect of iconic characters going head to head
irresistible. BtKvD is not a good movie, but in the spirit of Ed
Wood director William Beaudine makes sincere go of it. I'm betting
he loved those old movies – like Wood, he employed the language of
cinema he grew up on though it was well past its sell-by date. More
tellingly, he coaxed the aging John Carradine to reprise his role as
Count Dracula from those '40s Universal films.
When Jess Franco
and Chris Lee made a Dracula movie, the two were offering a different
take on the part from that played by Lee in the Hammer series. With
BtKvD, Carradine is a continuation of the same Dracula he played
before – sporting top hat and cape, Carradine's interpretation was
less nobleman and more circus sideshow huckster, emphasizing a
bug-eyed hypnotic stare. Though Beaudine's film is in color and
lacks Gothic touches, it still plays as if he thought it a direct
sequel to the Universal films.
In the 1800's
American West, young Melinda Plowman (Elizabeth Bentley) awaits the
arrival of her never-before-met Uncle James Underhill to aid her with
the ranch estate she has inherited. She is unaware that Dracula has
killed her Uncle and assumed his identity in a ploy to take control
of the estate and the silver mine on it. Not for the metal, though,
Dracula's interest is the mine itself. For no reason given, Dracula
now has a Pavlovian desire for caves (“CAVE?!” ), which I
guess is a holdover from 1958's The Return of Dracula wherein the
Count hid his coffin in a cave. Melinda's foreman William Bonney,
whom she happens also to be engaged to, suspects something is up when
the driver of the coach Underhill was riding turns up dead en route
with an unnamed male corpse, and a traveling Romanian family identify
Underhill as a vampire that attacked them. Melinda is going to need a
hero. Lucky for her, her beau is the reformed Billy the Kid.
If Carradine's
Dracula has never seemed much like Stoker's character, this Billy the
Kid is likewise far removed from anyone you'd expect to have been a
notorious outlaw. As William, Chuck Courtney channels the pluck and
decency of an earlier era's Young Male Hero, an all-around good fella
who respects the law but will punch out a bully if pushed to it.
Forget the premise of two icons in conflict, once it's got your butt
planted in the theater it's usefulness is spent.
I wish I could say
that BtKvD is so-bad-it's-good, which it is though not quite
aggressively enough. Carradine's hammy, mugging performance goes a
long way toward amending that (countering the damage done by the
dead-boring Billy), you could make a drinking game out of Carradine
wielding his eyes at the most inapt moments. The fx are hilarious as
well, fro m a ridiculous rubber bat to teleporting to the glaring
orange spot that keeps setting Carradine's face on fire. Beaudine
gifts the movie with bad lighting and ill-filtered day-for-night
shots, all so poorly done that it becomes impossible to tell day from
night. In at least one shot I was sure the rules for vampires in
sunlight had been suspended.
The acting s
generally as bad as the script. There's a great moment when the
skeptical Melinda tells the immigrant mother (who has now been hired
at the ranch) that William has asked her to confront Underhill with a
mirror. The Romanian woman's horrified reply is priceless: “The
Vampire Test!”. She gasps.
There's plenty
more silliness in dialog and detail, including a troupe of Native
Americans who want as little to do with the vampire as they do with
the movie itself. In another scene Dracula is unfazed by a round of
bullets but is knocked cold by having the empty gun thrown at him.
BtKvD is a little dull to endure at times, but I'm beginning to grow
fond of it just in writing the thing up now.
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