This one came as a surprise to me - it's actually fairly interesting to watch. It's a neat idea: a vampire in the old west. Why not - vampires can pop up any place in any century. This one made for a fun afternoon film to watch.We have a gun-slinging vampire taking over a small town. It is up to the preacher and Dolores Carter to save the town from people dying mysteriously of blood-loss and to deal with the stranger in town.This is not the finest vampire film on the market but it is a fun one - something different than normal. I enjoyed this one.6/10

Trying to resolve matters in a land-border dispute, a family's hiring of a strange gunslinger eventually causes them to realize he's the culprit behind a series of ghastly murders around town by draining women of blood and race to stop him before he completes his task.This is an overall curious and quite enjoyable effort. Basically this here turns out to be a cunning combination of Western and vampire horror, but for once the mixture is not a detriment to the other as they usually result in forsaking one part of the story for the other if the two chosen topics really have little in common with each other. Here, we get a typical Western about a ranch family involved in a border dispute with their neighbors who resorts to underhanded tactics to keep his side of the property without repercussions, involved in numerous shady deals with the authorities to keep himself in line and offers up plenty of shoot-outs, beatings and scenes of everyone wandering around on horse- back to fulfill that part of the storyline, and basically turns the script around by having the loner coming in to deal with the situation being a vampire. By still incorporating those tactics, where he resides in coffins, can't stay out in the sunlight for long periods of time and resorts to blood-drinking to carry out his orders all fall in line with known vampire lore, as well as the defense tactics used to stop his rampage that carries out on the outskirts of the story before being brought in by the land dispute where everything finally makes sense. The only real problems here is the last half, where the vampire far more often than necessary taunts the hero with long-winded speeches about humanity and faith of God, which really hurts his effectiveness as a villain since it all comes off so lame and stupid. Overall, though, it more than makes up for that one little flaw.Today's Rating/PG: Violence.

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

Typical of the low-budget B movies made during the 1950's, Curse of the Undead broke the mold by combining moviegoer's love of Westerns with the "new" Horror movie fans that thrived on such fare. Eric Fleming (Trailboss Gil Favor of Rawhide TV series), deserved better but Michael Pate as the gunfighter/vampire character, took his part and ran away with it...stole the movie from the other actors without even trying! This film had several memorable scenes, the one where he chases the preacher into the church is spooky, as is the one where he is seen on his black horse, rearing it up before killing the town Dr. Part of the reason (I think) why this movie rises above its level is the spooky and very dark, moody musical score. All in all, this is a good one to watch when you're tired of all the unnecessary gore that seem to be a staple of modern vampire films. The only thing I didn't like is that the vampire had no fangs, just normal teeth...oh well, I guess you can't have everything.