4th of July 2025 Marathoning

While putting together my review for The Return of Dracula (and reading the highlights of WWE’s Hell in the Cell), I had Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966) on in the background, eventually finishing both. Nothing much has changed since the last time I watched it: I pitied John Carradine and once again felt that this film (and others the actor found himself imprisoned in) didn’t deserve any of his time. But he’s in it and the idea that Billy the Kid could take down Dracula by hurling a gun at him, knocking this vampire count out with a single blow long enough to stake a knife through him is quite laughable and ridiculous. The premise itself is a laugher when just speaking aloud much less seeing it play out on screen before your eyes. But Carradine gives it his all, just the same, although for an eternal romantic bloodsucker who wets panties and makes hearts swoon, he hasn’t aged well and somehow finding his way into the Old West doesn’t do much for his complexion. Carradine looks even older to me in this film than he would much later in the likes of 1977’s Shockwaves. And ‘One Shot’ Beaudine lighting his face with red before he leans in to bite the throats of pretty young things doesn’t make sense even from an aesthetic point of view. You get Billy the Kid getting his ass kicked by a rival who even kicks his hat in the air while he lies unconscious, a half-assed gunfight between the two that lasts little more than thirty seconds with so much animosity built up, and the hilarious development that Dracula takes up running a dude ranch with William H Bonney as his lead boss. And Billy reforming to marry a pretty blond willing to forget his past for a brighter future by running a ranch while the town just ignores his crimes is such wholly historically inept claptrap…Billy looks so unimposing and couldn’t be any less bland or charisma-deprived. The film looks and feels cheap. But, strange as it might seem, the fucking trashheap hybrid of western/horror has grown on me, like mildew between the tile cracks. What can I say? I can be a sucker for such nonsense.