In a small town, women are dying by mysterious means, the only mark upon their bodies being two wounds to the neck. Doc Carter has no idea what could be causing it, nor does anyone else. While all this is happening, Carter also has to contend with Buffer, who has designs upon his land. Things do not go exactly as planned and Carter is killed. When his son looks to do something about it, he is killed as well. That only leaves the daughter named Dolores but she cannot do anything on her own and her boyfriend, who happens to be the local preacher cannot either. So she hires a gunfighter, a man who has never lost a battle no matter the odds. As she soon learns, there is a reason that he never fails because he is already dead. The man named Drake is a vampire and he means to make Dolores his no matter who stands in his way.

Curse of the Undead, released in 1959, would take the Western genre and add a good dose of horror to it, though when all was said and done,  there would be very little to scare any viewer. Most of what is shown on screen is intimated but director Edward Dein does a good job at making things tense and that tension palpable as the picture moves towards its climax. Michael Pate would play the erstwhile vampire, a man in black who is as mysterious as he is quiet. As it is, he looks for work where he goes as a gunfighter, the job as risk-free as anything in his state. It also allows him to move from town to town under no suspicion as he feeds on those he needs to keep his unnatural life going. Dein packs this film with a heavy atmosphere for the most part, there being nothing to illicit a laugh and nothing that one could call lighthearted in the slightest. There is the threat from Bruce Gordon’s Buffer always present, whether to land or to man and when Drake enters the picture, whether the characters know it or not, things tend to get just a little darker when he is around. There is a slight bit of romance present between Preacher Dan as played by Eric Fleming and Dolores as portrayed by Kathleen Crowley and the previously mentioned Drake, but aside from that the movie is more about death than anything else, death that was and death that is to come.

There would be a few things that would keep this movie from being absolutely great, the main one being a lack of real horror surrounding Drake and a lack of blood. Being a vampire and having one in the film, one would think to see more of the things normally associated with the monster present and yet there is not. It might have added a little more gravity to some of the scenes if one were able to see the vampire doing what he does best but alas, that is left to the imagination given the smaller budget of the movie. The other is a lack of action. There is a little here and there, a couple of stand-offs between those who are good and those who are not but they add up to little and being a western, seeing more gunfights would have kicked the pace up a notch or two. That being said, the story and the performances more than makeup for anything that would be considered a takeaway.

Even though Curse of the Undead could be considered a B movie, it is surprising to see just how underrated and how little the film is talked about. Mixing these two genres together, especially up to and in the year of its release, was not something that anybody could call common. One would think the novel idea of it would have made it more of a cult classic than it is. That being said, if one is given the chance, this film is worth hunting down to watch. The cast is solid, the writing good and altogether, a very entertaining time.

4 out of 5