TITLE: Billy the Kid Versus Dracula
YEAR RELEASED: 1966
DIRECTOR: William Beaudine
WRITER: Carl K. Hittleman
CAST: John Carradine, Chuck Courtney, Melinda Plowman, Virginia Christine, Walter Janovitz and Bing Russell
STUDIO: Circle Productions
BUY: Find Billy the Kid Versus Dracula on Amazon UK
Billy the Kid Versus Dracula 1966 review
Billy the Kid Versus Dracula throws the famous vampire into the American Old West, where John Carradine’s Count targets ranch heiress Betty Bentley and finds himself opposed by the reformed outlaw Billy the Kid.
Released as a double feature with Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, the film is one of the strangest meetings between classic Gothic horror and the Western.
It looks less like a feature film than an episode of a clean-cut 1960s Western television series in which somebody has suddenly chucked Dracula into the middle of the story.
That is more or less the charm of it.
Chuck Courtney plays Billy as a polite, clean-living young gunslinger — about as far from Emilio Estevez’s cheeky Young Gun as you can get.
He has to deal with John Carradine’s Dracula, who turns up in a top hat, with facial hair, huge staring eyes and no explanation for why he is wandering around the American West.
And Carradine is weird in this. Really creepy weird.
His vampire becomes obsessed with Billy’s fiancée, Betty Bentley, played by Melinda Plowman. He steals another man’s identity and starts working his way into her life. Identity theft, it turns out, was a problem in the Old West too.
The film treats it as sinister vampiric seduction, but Carradine plays it more like one of Tod Slaughter’s creepy uncles — not quite as gleefully wicked, but with the same leering, theatrical menace.
Those fixed, hungry eyes do a lot of the work.
John Carradine gets plenty to do as Dracula
Carradine had already played Dracula in House of Frankenstein 1944 and House of Dracula 1945, but strangely he gets more actual Dracula business here than he did in either of those Universal monster rallies.
He gets to stalk people, hypnotise them, menace the heroine, turn into a bat and generally dominate the film. There is a lot of Carradine, and despite what the actor himself later said about the picture, he is one of the reasons it remains watchable.
He later singled Billy the Kid Versus Dracula out as one of the worst films he made. He was too hard on it.
The film is undeniably cheap and much of the acting is pure television Western, but Carradine commits to the nonsense and gives the Count a bizarre presence.
He also looks terrific in the top hat.
At one point I was convinced the saloon keeper was Glenn Strange, who played Frankenstein’s Monster in the later Universal films.
It is not him, unfortunately, although the resemblance is strong enough to make you wish the film had managed to sneak Frankenstein’s Monster into the saloon as well.
A Dracula who does not play by the rules
This Dracula spends a surprising amount of time wandering around in broad daylight.
That is not quite the continuity error it can look like. In Bram Stoker’s novel, sunlight restricts Dracula’s supernatural powers but does not automatically destroy him. The idea that vampires burst into flames or disintegrate in sunlight became a much stronger screen convention later.
Still, the film barely seems interested in establishing any vampire rules at all.
Dracula walks about during the day, sits down at the table like everyone else and behaves less like an ancient supernatural creature than a particularly suspicious stranger who has arrived in town and refuses to leave.
Oddly, the name “Dracula” is never actually spoken in the film. It appears in the title, but within the story he is simply identified as a vampire.
The bat effects are hilarious, the fights are not exactly convincing and the whole thing has the spotless, studio-built feel of a Western TV show.
Even the German immigrant characters are enjoyable in their own rather useless way.
There is a particularly wonderful moment near the end when Billy shoots Dracula repeatedly at point-blank range and the vampire barely reacts.
Billy then throws the gun at him — and that knocks him over.
Great stuff.
So why is it called Billy the Kid Versus Dracula?
The title promises a showdown between the West’s famous outlaw and the world’s most famous vampire, but Billy does not really defeat Dracula.
That honour belongs to local doctor Henrietta Hull, played by Virginia Christine, who understands what they are dealing with and provides the knowledge needed to finish him off.
Billy gets the headline, but the woman doctor does much of the useful work.
I was still delighted when Dracula finally got it.
Carradine’s vampire is supposed to be irritating and predatory, and by the finish I was more than ready to see him dispatched.
Made cheaply, quickly and as half of a monster double bill
Billy the Kid Versus Dracula was made alongside Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, with both pictures directed by veteran William Beaudine.
They were his final feature films before he returned to television work.
The two films were shot rapidly in California in 1965, using locations including Red Rock Canyon and Corrigan Ranch as well as studio sets.
Contemporary production accounts make clear that keeping the films cheap was very much the point.
That shows on screen, but it also explains the strange appeal.
This is a cowboy television episode invaded by a Universal-style monster, with none of the polish, atmosphere or grandeur of the classic horror films.
It should be terrible. Parts of it are terrible. But it is also brisk, funny, odd and never boring.
Carradine gets far more screen time as Dracula here than Christopher Lee often managed in some of his Hammer Dracula appearances, and he uses every minute of it to stare, leer and generally behave like the strangest man west of the Mississippi.
It is not good Dracula, not good Billy the Kid and probably not good Western filmmaking.
But as a piece of 1960s horror-Western nonsense, I had a lot of fun with it.
Related: Browse more Dracula films, read our Dracula vs Frankenstein 1971 review and revisit Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein 1948.
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