Review of Curse of the Undead

This was another long-awaited acquaintance (acquired literally a couple of days ago) after having pored over a giant still from it in one of my father's books since childhood. Luckily for me, the film turned out to be worth waiting for - unlike BLOOD OF Dracula (1957) - and a good deal more successful in its anachronistic combination of the Western and Horror genres than THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN (1956) had been, not to mention the similar 'Vampire-Out-West' concept later seen in BILLY THE KID VS. Dracula (1966). Shot in atmospheric black-and-white by long-standing genre exponents Universal, it also features an effectively eerie (if a little too obvious) theremin-led score. The director is best-known for his oddball noir SHACK OUT ON 101 (1955; which is still lying in my unwatched pile) and would go on to helm THE LEECH WOMAN the following year (and which I will be watching presently). The cast here is quite decent: Australian actor Michael Pate is suitably menacing as the undead Mexican aristocrat posing as a gunslinger(!); John Hoyt as the town doctor is killed off rather too early; and a similar fate awaits no-nonsense Sheriff Edward Binns. The film's romantic leads are, for once, not a liability either: preacher Eric Fleming and Hoyt's vengeful daughter Kathleen Crowley. We have the usual Western scenario - a feud between two families, bar-room shoot-outs and open-air duels - and the expected horror elements - graveyard disturbances, night-time attacks (Pate is seen indiscriminately going for both male and female victims!) and love-starved vampires. The one major blunder that the film commits (and which, regrettably, made me lop off half-a-star from my rating) was the fact that Pate (after having been repeatedly seen sleeping in his coffin and complaining about how the sun affects his eyesight), he still accepts the preacher's invitation for a high-noon duel - where he is felled by a cross-marked bullet supposedly made out of Christ's very own crown of thorns!! Unfortunately, the copy I watched plagued with excessive combing but seeing how the film is inexplicably M. I. A. On DVD, it will have to do for some time to come.