Year:  1959
Rating: 6.0

---

It is not often that you come across a Western vampire film, but this is one of them. Maybe the only one. It wasn't a genre that exactly caught on, but this is surprisingly not bad at all with good acting, a lot of smart dialogue and a story that is more complex than expected. It was produced by Universal so that gives it some cache but without any big stars in it. It still has some recognizable faces in it though.


Playing the preacher is Eric Fleming who was just at the beginning of his role in the TV show Rawhide in which he plays the trail boss to Rowdy's Clint Eastwood. He was to die very young at 41 while shooting a film in Peru in which he drowned. Also on hand are John Hoyt and Edward Binns both who you would know if you saw them, Bruce Gordon (Frank Nitti in The Untouchables), Michael Pate (an Australian who almost always played a bad guy or oddly an Indian) and Kathleen Crowley who looks like Kim Novak but never hit the big time. But she like all of them take the film seriously and never camp it up.


There has been a spate of young girls dying in a small western town with two small marks on their neck. No one knows what to make of it. At the same time a stranger (Pate) dressed all in black like Johnny Cash comes into town and offers his services to a young woman (Crowley) having trouble with her bully neighbor (Gordon) who wants her ranch. His skills? Killing. He seems to have an unfair advantage though - he is slow on the draw but his opponent's bullets seem to keep missing him. Or do they? For a gunslinger vampire he isn't really a bad guy but as he says to the preacher, I have to live don't I? The preacher thinks otherwise.