Movie Review: Curse of the Undead (1959)
Synopsis: After her brother is murdered by her ruthless neighbor, Buffer, Delores Carter seeks a professional gunfighter to get revenge and hires the mysterious Drake Robey. What Delores doesn't know is Robey is a vampire who is responsible for a series of mysterious deaths around the local old west town.
Who's in it? The movie stars Michael Pate, Kathleen Crowley, John Hoyt, Bruce Gordon and Eric Fleming.
Review: I had planned on watching another vampire movie this morning but came across Curse of the Undead first. The idea of a vampire movie mixed with the western genre was interesting and I did enjoy Billy the Kid Versus Dracula more than expected so I decided to give it a try.
Unfortunately, it failed to live up to expectations.
As far as the western part of it goes, that truthfully wasn't terrible. It had the evil landowner (Gordon), a beautiful damsel in distress (Crowley), a small-town preacher (Fleming) who was obviously the movie's hero, and an unstoppable gunfighter (Pate) that fell somewhere in between the good and evil description while having the capability of being either an ally or an enemy.
Ironically, the fact it was such a good western did the vampire aspect more harm than good. In fact, the whole vampire thing kind of seemed forced, as though the writers added it at the last second in a desperate attempt to make this movie stand apart from dozens of similar westerns.
That said, I will be fair and say I thought Robey was a halfway decent vampire, as far as movie vampires go. Even though he does ultimately prove to be the bad guy, there were times when I could feel some sympathy for him, especially when some of his background was revealed.
In fact, had this been more of a traditional vampire movie, he may have even been somewhat memorable. It's just too bad the western them, combined with quite a few plot holes (including the large amount of time he spends in the sunlight despite claiming it both blinded and hurt him), prevents him and the overall movie in general from being anything special, just average.
Final Opinion: I do still think the overall idea had some promise. However, the overall execution just didn't work for me, and it would have been considerably better had the writers picked a lane and gone with either a vampire movie or a western rather than both.
My Grade: C-
_____________________________________________________________
Here are some reviews of other 1950s vampire movies:
Comments
Post a Comment