The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985), directed by Alan Clarke

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Snooker Hooligan", by The Reegs

       I praised Dark City for its originality, but now we come to a film that’s almost too original for its own good: Alan Clarke’s 1985 film Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (otherwise known as Billy and the Vampire), as far as I know the world’s only musical involving vampires and snooker, which to those of us outside the U.K. is a longer, sillier-sounding version of billiards, which is just a fancy term for pool. Seems like a bizarre premise for a musical, much less a film, but it seems like playwrights will attempt to push anything and everything into a musical if they think they can get away with it. I mean Heathers is a musical now, Spongebob Squarepants had one for a hot minute, even everyone’s favorite meme, Shrek, got to be a musical. If anything Alan Clarke is ahead of the curve, because his film is now the benchmark for every snooker-centric musical film that follows. Not a bad position to be in, I must say.

       Anyway, there’s not much to this story. Phil Daniels plays Billy Kid, a snotty Cockney punk and the rising star of the snooker world, and owner of some weird underground arcade bar or whatever the fuck. His manager T.O. or ‘The One’, because that’s what actual people name themselves, gets in deep with some shady folks and secretly agrees to set up a match between Billy and the current world champion Maxwell Randall, otherwise known as The Green Baize Vampire, who plays a vampire on TV and just might actually be a vampire in general. Thanks to some covert slander, the match is set. 17 frames, the winner gets the world title and 50,000 pounds, the loser never plays snooker again. It’s the match of the century, or it would be if they weren’t knocking balls into holes on a felt table. 

       Of course in a musical, the most important thing is the music, and to its credit Billy and the Vampire does have some entertaining songs, in the vein of Meatloaf and Richard O’Brien, and it does have some impressive vocal performances, particularly Bruce Payne as T.O., but the film has a problem with how the songs are paced. Not only is there a lack of build up to several of the songs in the film, but there are times where a song just leads into another song with no connecting scene at all. That combined with the fact there is very little in the way of story or character arcs, makes for a 90 minute film that feels like it’s five minutes long. Considering it’s a vampire snooker musical I suppose that’s no big thing, but that’s up to you.

       You can’t say that Alan Clarke and his crew didn’t have the time to restructure the film a bit either, because this whole film looks like it was made on a 20 dollar budget. Just about every scene in this movie, aside from those in Max’s house look like they were filmed in a nuclear fallout bunker, nothing but gray concrete rooms and unlit hallways, with the occasional drapery and piss yellow lighting for flavor. Hell even the driving scenes, one of which is the opening scene of the film, is just them sitting in an unmoving car in a dark room while strobe lights go off. I’ll give you credit for novelty, it gives things a bit of a stage play vibe (something which recurs at several points throughout the film) and it probably saved a few bucks, but I dunno, it comes across as unfortunately amateurish for a feature-length film. I feel like even your typical Troma fare would have at least thrown in some b-roll of a city on a green screen or shook the car around like it’s moving or something. I could just be feeling overly critical though.

       To sum things up, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire is dumb B-movie fun in a form you might not expect. While I wouldn’t call it an undiscovered indie gem, if you got some friends and some drinks with you it’ll probably make for a fun evening. Although you could easily replicate it this Halloween by dressing up as a vampire and going out to a bar to play pool yourself, singing loudly at all the other patrons as you did it. Your call.