Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966)

*Spoiler/plot- 1966, An immigrant couple and their young daughter are covered wagon traveling in the West, but still they sleep under the stars. "Dracula" attacks the young daughter but is scared away by her cross. Then Dracula rides on a local stagecoach with an old woman and her brother, who are heading to the Double Bar B ranch. The ranch was owned the old woman's dead husband. Mrs. Double Bar B shows off a picture of her 18-year-old daughter to Dracula. Dracula is interested but does not act immediately. Then, we are introduced to Betty and Billy the Kid roles. Billy is the foreman of the Double Bar B ranch. Dracula arrives in town, posing as Betty's now-dead uncle, James Underhill. Dracula lives at the Double Bar B Ranch and is playing at being a ranch owner. The immigrant couple will stay in the town after Dracula kills their daughter, because the immigrant woman is determined to kill Dracula and save Betty and the other local young girls. Billy meets up with Dracula in the old abandoned silver mine and an epic battle ensues.*Special Stars- John Carradine, Chuck Courtney, Harry Carey Jr.*Theme- The goodness and purity of the American western culture will amend the mistakes of the corrupt evil European ways.*Based on- Dracula and Western cowboy myths *Trivia/location/goofs-ONLINE. Film locations were at the once famous and much visited 50's Ray 'Crash' Corrigan's Movie Ranch in Simi Valley, CA. Too many film goofs: Obvious fake bat swoops out from behind the wagon, all the exterior night shots are cheap day-for-night lenses, actor playing Billy The Kid role is not believable, the Doctor gives Billy an oversize metal scalpel knife that Billy drives into Dracula's heart, and a flapping fake bat on a string is shown.*Emotion- A somewhat forgettable film. RIDICULOUS: Dracula is knocked down by Billy throwing his empty pistol at the Count, while down the doctor's surgery scalpel is pushed into Cracula's chest by Billy resulting in a caped skeleton appearing. It's bad, but it's also boring. And boring is dead for a film. Not much really happens that matters cinematically for the audience.

Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966)*** (out of 4)Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney) has settled down and is now working on a ranch where he has fallen in love with its owner Elizabeth (Melinda Plowman). Her uncle (John Carradine) shows up to pay her a visit and soon Billy realizes that he's really COunt Dracula.If you go into a movie called BILLY THE KID VERSUS Dracula and take it serious then you really need to take a long, deep look at your life and wonder why you take things so seriously. THis here was obviously meant to be camp and with WIlliam Beaudine behind the camera they managed to get the movie in the can in five days. Who would have thought that all these decades later that the film would still have a nice little following among bad movie lovers?For my money this here is one of the greatest bad movies ever made and it's entertainment value is pretty much off the charts. The only bad movie that comes closer to such entertainment is PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE so these two really are the kings of their sub- genre. What makes this film so entertaining is the fact that everyone is taking it pretty serious. The cast are all extremely serious and they're treating these events as if they were in a serious drama.The one exception is Carradine who appears to know this is pure camp. He's simply wonderful here and you can't help but call this a great comic performance. I mean, look at an early scene where he's in a bar and a girl with her parents have accused him of being a vampire. He says "a vampire" and take a look at his eyes as he says the line. Pure camp. The actor was a very smart man and a terrific actor who took roles like this to take care of his children. It's clear he knew he was making a low-budget horror movie and he's just making it fun.Beaudine actually makes this look like an actual Western and the film comes off as a real production and not just some cheap film. I'd also argue that the entire film is just about as entertaining as something like this could get. The horror elements are all rather silly as is everything else about the film but it has a certain innocent charm that really comes across.

John Carradine said this was the worst movie he ever made. It may have also been his worst performance as Dracula, a role he had assumed more than than any other character he portrayed in his illustrious career (at least six times in films and twice on TV, according to his IMDb filmography.) That being said,it's still not half bad as a B western-horror movie. It may be odd to see a vampire in the old West, but maybe he was looking for Frankenstein's daughter to help her take on Jesse James, the movie which veteran director William Beaudine released just before this one (JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER.) Ironically, this was the last film Beaudine made in a career that lasted from the silent films he made four decades before with Mary Pickford, to a series of Bowery Boys flicks, then on to a string of memorable TV shows like SPIN AND MARTY, RIN TIN TIN and LASSIE. Although Beaudine's cinematic career might have ended here,he kept working, shooting more LASSIE episodes, a DISNEYLAND episode called "Ten who Dared" about Major Powell's epic boat journey through the Grand Canyon and a couple of GREEN HORNET episodes, which were packaged with other programs into two Green Hornet films, a much better ending to his career than his silly film about two legendary killers. The film is just getting started when the story takes an ironic turn. The vampire has boarded a stagecoach at night where he meets a whiskey drummer, just as Carradine's gambler character had done in the classic STAGECOACH film he made with John Wayne. After he kills an Indian girl at a rest stop, her tribe takes off after the stage, in the director's homage to his colleague John Ford's masterpiece. There's not a lot more to recommend for this film. Billy only has one gun fight and two fist fights before the inevitable final showdown between the title protagonists. Dracula faces little resistance except from the immigrant mother of his second victim, who has a hard time convincing anyone a killer is going around biting helpless women and sheep to death. Some memorable TV character actors are seen here, such as Kurt Russell's dad Bing, who played Sheriff Coffee's deputy on BONANZA,Roy Barcroft from SPIN AND MARTY and the aforementioned Folgers Coffee lady.When all is said and done, the film does a fair job of telling what might happen if these two legendary figures from history and literature had met. Sure, the vampire may appear in daylight and the means chosen for dispatching him is something other than a wooden stake, and Billy the Kid would be the last cowboy to give up gunslinging glory to become a sheep puncher for anyone, but this is a Hollywood film after all, so don't expect much accuracy in either historical or literary rendering. Beaudine was never in a class with other great directors of his time, but there were few that lasted in Hollywood for over half a century as he did. Producers liked his way of shooting within a budget and audiences liked the stories he told on film, so his films usually made money and his movies and TV shows were seldom boring to watch. This flick may not have been his or Carradine's best works, but it's a good opportunity to see the efforts of such screen legends as these two at work together, along with some familiar faces from the small screen. Dale Roloff

With a title like this movie has, it's obvious that the film's creators had no great pretense--they KNEW they weren't making Shakespeare! However, despite the stupid title and a very low budget, the film isn't quite as bad as it sounds. It really isn't good, but at least the actors and director tried to make a film that is reasonably watchable, as they played it straight throughout--as if they expected people to actually watch and respect a film called BILLY THE KID VERSUS Dracula.John Carradine plays the Count, though it seems that the writer had never seen a vampire movie before, since so much in this film violates popular vampire lore. For example, here Dracula walks around during the daytime, does not sleep in a coffin, his face magically lights up in red when he's hypnotizing people and wolves-bane drives him away--as if he's the wolf-man! And, as far as acting goes, Carradine was the worst of the actors in the film--looking more like the Devil and over-acting throughout. The Dracula he plays in this film is considerably different than the one he more subtly played in HOUSE OF Dracula and HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. While the cape and top hat and bright red bow might have fit into these two earlier vampire films, here he just looks pretty stupid out West--especially when no one even questioned this flamboyant attire.As for the plot, the old vampire shows up, inexplicably, in the West and meets up with an amazingly civil and law-abiding Billy the Kid. Mr. The Kid is in love with a cute lady but she is also the focus of Dracula's lust. In the end, they battle it out (of course) in a rather limp conclusion--it's one of the most anti-climatic ends in monster history.All in all, this is a bad movie but not the type that you'd enjoy watching (like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE). It's more the type that just makes your brain hurt due to its ineptness and dull script.