April 17: Fake Bat Appreciation Day —Watch a movie with a fake bat in it.

It’s Fake Bat Appreciation Day, a holiday I just made up to celebrate the kind of cinema where the strings are visible, the wings are made of felt and the actors have to pretend they aren’t being pelted with a taxidermy project gone wrong. I wish I could watch A Lizard In a Woman’s Skin again so I could delight in the bats in it, but this starts with an animated bat and has a bat-on-a-string moment that lasts an eternity.

I’ve heard a lot of people say some bad things about this movie, and man, I realize I have no taste because I loved every single moment of it. I could go back right now and watch it again, which I can’t say I’ve done for any movie in a long time. 

Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney, who played the Lone Ranger’s nephew Dan Reid on TV) has gone straight. He’s moved to a mining town to find a good woman and settle down. Well, he actually stole a good woman and made her his fiancée. He’s efficient like that. 

That girl is Betty Bentley (Melinda Plowman), and she’s a catch: she’s cute, she knows how to work a Winchester and her family owns the local mine. She’s also caught the eye of Count Dracula, played by the legendary John Carradine. I love Skinny Dracula, which is what I call any Carradine Dracula. This one is dumb enough to hide out in a silver mine when silver can kill him. What are you thinking? Then again, this Dracula also walks around during the day, so who are we to put limits on him?

Dracula decides to pose as Betty’s uncle to get close to her, but he’s got competition. Not just Billy, but also Dan “Red” Thorpe (Bing Russell, father of Kurt!), the man Billy cucked to get Betty. Red is so blinded by rage that he doesn’t even care that a vampire is snooping around his Western hometown; he just wants Billy dead.

This was shot at the same time as the movie it played double features with, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, both directed by William Beaudine as his last films. It took eight days to film both.

Carradine said of this movie: “I have worked in a dozen of the greatest, and I have worked in a dozen of the worst. I only regret Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Otherwise, I regret nothing.”

You can watch this on Tubi.