Saturday, October 30, 2010

Horror Fest V Day Two: Curse of the Undead

Curse of the Undead is a Universal cheapie from the 1950s that is 80% Western, 15% melodrama, and 5% vampire film. Even when it is a vampire film - and you can tell, because that's when the theremin starts playing - it's not a good or even credible vampire film, although it might explain certain elements of the True Blood and Twilight series.

If you're looking for a plot, I suppose you could say that Curse of the Undead is along the lines of Shane or A Fistful of Dollars, if the mysterious stranger that rides into town to help a rancher save her land was a vampire. No, seriously. A vampire that dresses in black, walks around in daylight, and periodically sleeps in a coffin. He's very keen on drinking blood, and it seems like the film might wander into traditional vampire territory, as he slowly turns the rancher's daughter (figuratively and literally) away from the town preacher. The only thing that seems to bother our fangslinger is the cross button (I'm not kidding) the preacher wears, allegedly containing wood from the crucifixion.

The Twilight and True Blood connection comes in because there are long - some might say interminable - scenes where the vampire (who was hired to kill a land grabber) wanders around town, taunting the preacher, talking to the Sheriff, negotiating with the man he's supposed to be killing, and then trying to uncover some kind of landowner conspiracy. When he's not doing that, the vampire is arguing that his "condition" is unfairly judged by the preacher. There's a lot of chatter in Curse of the Undead, and considering that it's not a very long movie, that's a bad thing indeed.

Curse of the Undead is so far from horror that the creative geniuses involved in the film decided to indicate that the "man in black" was a vampire by playing a theremin every single time the camera cuts to him. Were it not for a decent set up - involving attacks on young women in the desert by an unknown assailant - and the semi-novel way the preacher wins his gunfight with the vampire (just guess), I'd say that Curse of the Undead was a total wash. At the very least, I understand why the film never made it to DVD...

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