Curse of the Undead falls squarely into that familiar ‘things you want to like more than you do’ territory. It’s not bad, but it’s certainly not great either. As a very early example of a weird western, you want to enjoy it just for the novelty of the thing. Not to mention it’s a comparatively rare ‘50s horror flick from the one-time home of classic monsters, Universal Studios. Sadly, the film is no Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Objectively it’s quite a bit better than fellow mash-up Billy the Kid vs Dracula, the most obvious comparison piece. However, at least that one’s inept enough to be consistently amusing, especially given John Carradine’s hambone titular performance. And on the other end of the scale, neither is Curse of the Undead as actually good as fellow ‘50s vampire cheapie Return of Dracula. It’s more of the type of thing you watch to cross it off the list.
We open with a small western town’s resident sawbones (Western veteran John Hoyt) and handsome young preacher Dan (Eric Fleming, soon to be the star of TV’s Rawhide opposite Clint Eastwood) scratching their heads over the inevitable Young Woman Suffering from the Mysterious Ailment Plaguing the Area. Here they predictably establish that quite a few young women have died from it lately, raising the old issue of vampires who seem to require way too much feeding to be practical.
The doc and his family are involved in a feud with would be land baron Buffer (played by Bruce Gordon, most famous for playing gangster Frank Nitti on TV’s The Untouchables). When the all-in-black vampire gunslinger Drake Robey eventually shows up, we expect him to start working for fellow blackguard Hennessey. One of the film’s few novel twists, however, is that he is instead hired by the doc’s daughter—and the film’s female lead—to avenge her father and brother’s eventual deaths. This naturally fails to sit well with Dan, both in his roles as preacher, and as, conveniently for the plot, as Dolores’s fiancé.
In the end everything proves to be a plot of Drake’s to reclaim his family’s former land and Dolores along with it. Drake was originally Drago Robles, a Spanish scion several generations back who became a vampire after killing his brother in a jealous rage and then committing suicide in his grief soon after. He fled after returning from the dead and has wandered the Earth in the years since as an unkillable mercenary. Due to a highly convenient diary, not to mention an even more convenient photograph, Dan figures all this out and then must deal with Drake before Dolores falls victim to him as well.
Curse’s biggest issue is that it’s basically a generic, and rather flat, oater with a vampire jammed into it. Although the movie is only 80 minutes it still feels sluggishly paced. Things do pick up some when Drake makes the scene. That first section of the film is kind of a grind, however, and the pacing is still often torpid even in the later section of the film.
The movie’s also weirdly structured. Early on Buffer is posited to be the film’s villain. Once the vampiric gunslinger shows up, though, Buffer’s role is necessarily diminished. At this point, his now largely extraneous presence drags things down quite a bit. Meanwhile, the big reveal that Drake Robey, utilizing the most obvious alias this side of Count Alucard, used to be rich local landowner Drago Robles doesn’t really pay off in any way. If anything the idea feels a bit forced. Still, at least Dolores isn’t the reincarnation of Drake’s former love or anything. We can blame Dan Curtis for that crap.
The film offers several unusual permutations of traditional movie vampire lore. Most obviously Drake is often seen walking around in broad daylight. Drake is never seen to change into a bat or fog, and eats regular food and drinks whiskey. Also, perhaps because of the film’s vampirism-caused-by-sin angle, Drake’s victims don’t become vampires themselves.
While that latter bit mitigates somewhat the scale of the ‘plague,’ it’s still true that Drake seems to have bitten a lot of the townsfolk in his short time there. One wonders how he plans to settle down in an area where the rather sparse local population would be exhausted so quickly, especially after he vampirizes Dolores. (Although, again positing Drake as an anti-hero more than villain, but he eventually declines to vampirize our heroine after falling in love with her.)
The vampirism born of personal sin is a nicely novel flourish, and harkens more closely to actual vampire (and werewolf) folklore than the traditional movie rules. Dan’s rejection of Drake’s tragic-torment-of-the-damned spiel, based on the idea that by committing suicide Drake had of his own choosing closed himself off from the Lord’s forgiveness, is theologically credible. However, chances are it will also be incomprehensible to many modern viewers. In the wake of Anne Rice’s redefining if infantile take on vampires as glamorously decadent fantasy fulfilment, Dan would probably have come off better today if he had instead rejected Drake’s self-serving pleas for sympathy by citing all of the, you know, murders he commits.*
[*Indeed, in Tom Weaver’s commentary, Preacher Dan takes quite a beating. I listened to the commentary after writing the above, whereupon I heard Dan being given both barrels for being an insufferable, ineffectual and sanctimonious stuffed shirt. Meanwhile, Weaver dubs the admittedly more complexly written Drake to be “Joe Cool.”]The film only occasionally attempts any directorial flourishes. The best scene is Drake stalking Dan through the deserted nighttime town square. Here we get a lot of Nosferatu-esque shadow work. In a panic, Dan eventually rushes to the entrance of the church. In a shot (literally) foreshadowing the climax of The Brides of Dracula, Drake is stymied by the large shadow of a cross. Dan blinks, and Drake has disappeared, although we ourselves see the vampire’s wall-cast shadow speeding unnaturally from the scene.
The cinematography is lackluster as well, although perhaps that’s partly due to the blu ray’s digital presentation. Nighttime scenes, especially those featuring Drake and presumably meant to evoke a noir-ish feel, are frequently overly dark. In contrast, many interior shots are ludicrously overlit, making one wonder how prevalent klieg lights were in the old west.
In terms of successfully merging the western and vampire elements, the most successful bit is Drake’s rather douchebag signature play of letting his gunfight rivals shoot him before gunning them down. Therefore they all die while grousing that they know they plugged Drake first. This also sets up the climatic gunfight with Dan. While I can’t say I found the mechanism of the vampire’s demise is particularly impressive—and it’s also super heavily telegraphed—at least it forgoes the traditional staking him in his coffin bit.
Characterization is overall stolid at best, with again only Drake being even two dimensional. Fleming does what he can with Dan, but it isn’t much. Busy actress Kathleen Crowley as Dolores also fails to shine, as like Fleming she’s hampered by the script and stilted character direction.
On the other hand, veteran heavy Michael Pate, a Michael Ansara-type, clearly enjoyed—no pun intended—digging his teeth into his far flashier role. He’s still hampered by the film’s shortcomings, but easily gives the picture whatever juice it has. Apparently he looked back at the movie with a degree of fondness, and you understand why. Apparently he and Kathleen Crowley especially enjoyed working together, a fact well established in Weaver’s commentary.
The Blu Ray for Curse of the Undead, which never got a lot on TV play when I was a kid, was issued by the reliable Kino Lorber. As previously indicated, it also offers a typically fun and informative audio commentary from film historian Tom Weaver. I don’t know how much Weaver makes for these things—probably not all that much—but it’s a wise investment for the companies putting the discs out. I certainly wouldn’t have laid out $15 for this film, or for the recently reviewed Karloff vehicle The Ape, if not for the commentaries they included as sweeteners.
Weaver’s commentary is, as usual, well worth a listen. Indeed, it’s one of the better ones I’ve heard from him. As is his wont, he uses actors to read comments from the cast and crew that he had interviewed over the decades. He point out pertinent similarities to other undead films, including the even more obscure Africa-set Vampire’s Ghost. You can’t go wrong with a Weaver commentary, they are always informed, impeccably researched and wryly humorous. I laughed when Weaver quoted a friend of his who, after seeing Drake gun down Buffer, “…retitled the movie ‘Vampire, the Buffer Slayer.’”
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