BILLY THE KID VS DRACULA (1966) ON THE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT

Before MST3K there was The Texas 27 Film Vault. Before Joel and Mike there was Randy and Richard! Before Deep 13 there was Level 31.

Balladeer’s Blog continues its celebration of the program’s FORTIETH anniversary year. Beginning on Saturday February 9th, 1985 “Film Vault Technicians First Class” Randy and Richard presented old serials and bad or campy movies while wielding their machine guns in defense of “America’s schlock-culture heritage.”

MOVIE: Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1966)    

ORIGINAL BROADCAST DATE: Saturday May 18th, 1985 from 10:30pm to 1:00am. Broadcast throughout Texas and Oklahoma. 

SERIAL: Before showing and mocking John Carradine’s Billy the Kid vs Dracula our members of the Film Vault Corps (“the few, the proud, the sarcastic”) showed and mocked an episode of the Mascot Serial The Phantom Empire (1935). 

In that classically campy serial Gene Autry played a singing cowboy who saves the world from an  advanced underground civilization that comes complete with killer robots who wear cowboy hats.

Randy Clower (right) with co-host Richard Malmos as “Film Vault Technicians First Class” on The Texas 27 Film Vault

FILM VAULT LORE: Special thanks to my fellow Vaultie “King Vita” for the date of this episode. The King recalls that he got all excited because he assumed the coincidental “all-western” theme of this episode of The Texas 27 Film Vault, along with the “Texas” part of the title, meant that every episode would focus exclusively on westerns. (Ken Miller’s recurring character Tex probably added to his mistaken impression.)

Needless to say, he learned he was wrong by the following episode but still fell in love with the show.

REVIEW: Billy the Kid vs Dracula is one of the most notorious Golden Turkeys of all time and was directed by the legendary William “One Shot” Beaudine. Beaudine got his nickname for his commitment to using just one take for each scene, no matter how good or bad. And by this point in his career – which reached back to the days of silent movies – there were a lot more bad takes than good.  

The star of Billy the Kid vs Dracula was John “He’s probably even in the Zapruder Film if you look hard enough” Carradine. As Dracula, Carradine bugs out his eyes, mugs to the camera and twists his face into so many goofy expressions it makes his performance in Voodoo Man seem almost dignified and reserved.

Carradine’s TRUE co-star in this movie is not the stiff playing Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney), but rather the virtually non-stop day-for-night shooting that was typical of so many bad movies but which took center stage in this film. I don’t care which other movies you want to talk about THIS ONE easily eclipses those (see what I did there) in terms of the sheer amount of screen time featuring a nice sunny day while the characters talk about it being nighttime. 

Melinda Plowman plays Betty Bentley, Billy the Kid’s true love and the motive behind the sudden abandonment of his criminal career. Dracula gets the hots for her when he sees a photo of her as he shares a stagecoach with her mother and distant uncle. Drac kills Mom and Uncle James, then assumes the uncle’s identity to get close to Betty.  

Drac never drinks … whiskey.

Virginia Christine, remembered by most Americans as “the Folger’s Coffee Lady”, portrays a European immigrant whose superstitious familiarity with vampire lore is at first scoffed at by the other cast members but then proves crucial to saving the day. 

Olive Carey, from THE legendary Carey Family, plays Doctor Henrietta Hull, the town physician who helps Billy the Kid save Betty from Count Dracula. Doc Hull is at the core of two of my favorite lines of dialogue from this movie. The first one comes from Drac, who inquires about her by asking “Where can I find this pill-slinging backwoods female?” The second one is said by Doc herself when she admits to having had no real schooling. (Um, as a doctor, shouldn’t she have had at least SOME schooling?)  

Harry Carey, Jr is along for the ride as Ben Dooley and is kept company by Bing Russell, who plays the movie’s secondary villain Dan Thorpe. Throw in an alleged Indian Tribe that look even more Caucasian than the Hekawi Tribe from F-Troop, a very cheap bat prop for Dracula’s transformations and the legendary scene where Drac gets pumped full of bullets to no effect but is then knocked out cold when the empty six-shooter is THROWN at him. Classic!  

IN THE NEAR FUTURE BALLADEER’S BLOG WILL PRESENT MORE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT MILESTONES.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW –https://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

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