The Western was once the Great American Genre, dominating film, television, and all types of print media for the better part of a century. Today, cowboy tales are still popular, albeit as part of the genre-spanning aesthetic known as Weird Western. You might think that Weird Westerns are a modern phenomenon, and that previous generations took their oaters straight without any sci-fi or horror elements. You’d be wrong, of course. Wonderfully, deliriously wrong. While it’s great fun to watch a Weird Western specifically crafted as such, it’s even more delightful to watch one made before the genre was even a thing.
The Wild Wild West (1965-69), about the adventures of secret agents in the employ of Ulysses Grant, was an early ancestor of both the Weird Western and the steampunk genre. The Ray Harryhausen film The Valley of Gwangi (1967) pitted circus cowboys against possibly-demonic Mexican dinosaurs. And then there’s the subject of today’s article, the certifiably bonkers double feature of Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (both 1966).
Made consecutively on the same sets by the same crew, Daughter and Kid represent the final completed work of legendary B-movie director William Beaudine. “One Shot” Beaudine was extremely prolific, helming no fewer than 177 feature films and innumerable shorts and television episodes. His career began with an apprenticeship under pioneering silent filmmaker D.W. Griffith, but had been steadily declining ever since. Kid and Daughter are far from Beaudine’s worst, but there’s a fascinating curtain of decay and finality that hangs over the entire productions. These are films about death in literal, figurative, and personal ways.
The films were shot at Corriganville Movie Ranch, a once-thriving film set that doubled as a theme park on weekends. Owned by legendary Hollywood stuntman Crash Corrigan, the ranch operated for decades, hosting everything from episodes of The Lone Ranger (1949-57) to the bloated Biblical epic The Robe (1953). In the mid-1960s, Corrigan sold the ranch to pay for a cripplingly expensive divorce, and Daughter and Kid were among the final films shot at the ranch under Corrigan’s ownership. Ironically for Corrigan, who never regained his fortune and died alone in an Oregon mobile home, the land was purchased by Bob Hope, who named it “Hopeville.”
Billy the Kid vs. Dracula
Here, the famous rat-faced serial murderer is played by square-jawed Chuck Courtney. The role of Dracula is played by John Carradine, slumming it nearly as hard as Beaudine in his old age. Carradine had played Dracula for Universal way back in the 1940s, making him the biggest star in either film by a country mile. Even though the second wave of that studio’s horror output didn’t match the first in terms of production value, it was still head and shoulders above this threadbare effort.
Dracula wants to make Billy’s girl Melinda (Elizabeth Bentley) into one of his vampire brides, and also to take over a cattle ranch via identity theft. This fundamental philosophical opposition results in a series of poorly-conceived confrontations, climaxing with literally the only time that throwing an empty gun has incapacitated a monster after bullets failed. Billy and Melinda are implied to live happily ever after, but the entirety of the Kid’s mythos is based upon his death at twenty-one. There are no happy endings. Gunfighters die, and vampires die twice.
Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter
Can I register my dissatisfaction with the use of “meets” as the operative verb in crossover film titles? “Versus” is cheesy as Hell, but “meets” makes the crossover seem so antiseptic. The American Southwest will never be the same after legendary outlaw Jesse James and the heiress to the sinister Frankenstein legacy SHAKE HANDS and EXCHANGE PLEASANTRIES. The plot involves the granddaughter of Dr. Frankenstein (yes, I know, the title, shut up) who has moved to the American West to transplant the brains of Mexican peasant children into the bodies of grown men. The fierce thunderstorms out west make this easier to do, apparently. Maria Frankenstein (Narda Onyx) decides that she needs stronger bodies for her monsters, and chooses a burly cowpoke named Hank (Cal Bolder) who just happens to be the last remaining henchman of Jesse James (John Lupton). This, you can imagine, puts them at odds.
While there is plenty of onscreen death in Kid, it’s nothing compared to the existential horror of Daughter. Characters die, sure, but the film’s tone approaches the apocalyptic. Infamous gangs of outlaws dwindle to single digit numbers. Entire villages vanish, fodder for Maria Frankenstein’s mad science. Even Jesse James himself is dead; the events of the movie take place after his historically-recorded murder at the hands of his friend Robert Ford, which the film claims did not happen. It’s supposed to be a dodge to explain how a demonstrably dead historical character went on to have additional adventures, but that’s not how it feels. Characters repeatedly insist to the protagonist’s face that he is dead as he battles forces of actual, supernatural undeath, a metafictional juxtaposition rarely faced by John Wayne.
In the End
Taken together — and in their historical context as the last gasps of filmmakers like Corrigan and Beaudine — the films are a study in death and undeath. In Daughter, Jesse James experiences a unique sort of undeath as he makes his way through a world that considers him dead, but has also rendered his breed obsolete. In Kid, Billy triumphs over a vampire, but his own death is inevitable thanks to his inescapable mythic narrative.
Both men also suffer from a kind of pop culture undeath. James and the Kid were routinely plucked from their eternal slumber to star in shit like this; there’s even a charming Twilight Zone episode that dealt with the unique flavor of immortality suffered by legendary gunfighters. Perhaps it’s expecting too much, especially since contemporary audiences wouldn’t have been aware of the films’ status as the last, weary work of beaten men, but one hopes at least a few necking teenagers felt their first pangs of existential dread as this double feature rolled on at the drive-in.
