Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 259: Okay, fine, I'll talk about 'Vampire Zombies... From Space!' (2024)

Some moments from the genre-hopping comedy Vampire Zombies... From Space.

I try never to dismiss a whole genre or subgenre of movies. In fact, it irritates me when I hear people say things like, "I hate all musicals," "I don't like science-fiction," or "I never watch Westerns." Because it means that they've dismissed a huge number of movies they've (mostly) never seen in one fell swoop. To me, statements like that suggest a depressing lack of intellectual curiosity. You're telling me you won't watch a movie because it's in a broad category you don't like? As John Waters would say, that's "contempt without investigation." 

I've been down this road before.

Having said all that—and here I reveal myself as a total hypocrite—there is one subgenre of movies that I approach with extreme skepticism: the fake B-movie. You know, those self-conscious comedies that satirize the low-budget movies of the past while also paying tribute to them. I'm talking about stuff like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001), Buddy BeBop vs. the Living Dead (2009), and Frankenstein vs. The Creature from Blood Cove (2005). You'd be surprised how many of these movies there are, and I feel like I've sat through more than my fair share of them over the years.

More often than not, these movies make me feel vaguely guilty. They're labors of love, but I rarely love them back. The people who make movies like this grew up watching cheap sci-fi and horror flicks, and now they just want to honor their earliest influences in a fun, playful way. What's wrong with that? Well, nothing... in theory. 

But these movies are constantly elbowing you in the ribs, desperate for you to know that they're "in on the joke." They always make a point of emphasizing how shoddy the special effects are, how clunky the dialogue is, and how improbable the story is. They never trust you, the viewer, to figure out any of that on your own. Everyone in the cast seemingly has a license to overact with total abandon, too, as if their lines are somehow funnier if they YELL EVERY WORD! You can always count on plenty of in-jokes and pop culture references in these movies, and there's a good chance you'll be seeing some winking celebrity cameos along the way. It's all much of a muchness. 

Some of these fake B-movies are tributes to Edward D. Wood, Jr., which, I guess, makes them my problem. Or my jurisdiction. And so, I've dutifully sat through John Johnson's Plan 9 (2015) and Andre Perkowski's Devil Girls (1999) and The Vampire's Tomb (2013). Generally, these movies are not a lot of fun for me. I appreciate what the directors are trying to do, but the forced wackiness becomes oppressive after a while. It's like being stuck in an elevator with a college improv troupe.

And that brings us to the movie I'm covering this week. I've known about Michael Stasko's Vampire Zombies... From Space! (2024) for a while now. I get Google alerts about Ed Wood on a daily basis, and there have been plenty of articles over the last year or so about Vampire Zombies and how it compares to Ed's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). I've been studiously avoiding Stasko's film for months, namely because of my previously-stated aversion to fake B-movies. I'd only gotten as far as the (admittedly kind of fun) trailer and didn't feel like exploring this matter any further. Yes, I was guilty of "contempt without investigation."

A heartfelt tribute.

However, in recent days, Vampire Zombies... From Space! has generated some discussion on the Ed Wood Jr. Facebook group, so I thought I'd finally get around to watching the darned thing and judging it for myself, trying to keep an open mind. For the most part, it was what I was expecting. Intentionally cheesy effects? Check. Arch dialogue delivered in a hammy way? Check. References and in-jokes? Double check. Quirky cameos? You betcha.

Happily, though, I ended up enjoying Vampire Zombies a little more than I thought I would. This is a stylish, fun, occasionally funny, and proudly madcap film that truly is a love letter to the sci-fi and horror films of the 1950s, including the oeuvre of Edward D. Wood, Jr. You don't need to be intimately familiar with Eddie's work to enjoy Vampire Zombies, since it's not a direct sequel to Plan 9. But Stasko and his cohorts were strongly influenced by Plan 9 and its curious juxtaposition of three idioms: the vampire movie, the zombie movie, and the alien invasion movie.

You may have noticed the first adjective I used to describe Vampire Zombies was "stylish," and that was my biggest surprise while watching it. Despite its frugal budget, this is a great-looking, visually-striking film. Not long ago, I wrote an article about how the independent filmmaker has been liberated in many ways since Ed Wood's time. Vampire Zombies is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The director takes all the tricks of modern filmmaking—green screen, drones, digital effects—that would have been utterly unknown to Ed Wood and uses them to expand the scope and ambition of his story. But, by filming Vampire Zombies in crisp black-and-white, Stasko retains that classic 1950s drive-in feel. No doubt about it, folks, this movie is a treat to look at and listen to. The filmmakers are to be commended for their achievements in numerous categories: lighting, cinematography, makeup, editing, costuming, music, and more. Kudos all around. Bonus points for giving us convincing soundalike versions of genuine '50s songs.

Plotwise, there is a hell of a lot going on here. There are numerous quirky characters jostling for screen time in Vampire Zombies... From Outer Space, perhaps too many to concentrate on. But I suppose our central character is Count Dracula (Craig Gloster, doing a sketch comedy Bela Lugosi impression), who wages war on the human race from a floating satellite very similar to Space Station 7 from Plan 9. It is 1957, and Dracula's chief target is a small rural town called Marlow, a quaint community known mostly for its tobacco fields. Why this unassuming hamlet should be the focus of his rage is beyond me, but I think the point is to limit the film's action to one manageable locale. It's very similar to how most of the action in Plan 9 takes place in and around a single cemetery in Southern California.

In this story, Dracula commands a fleet of flying saucers and aims to turn the people of Earth, starting with the ones in Marlow, into mindless, aggressive vampire zombies. He's previously been thwarted in his efforts because of the crucifixes some of us humans wear around our necks, but his wiseacre son Dylan (Robert Kemeny) has devised a formula that makes vampires "immune to the humans' T necklaces." Unfortunately for Drac, he reports to a council of grouchy vampire elders who are running out of patience with him and plan to either "kill or murder" him if he fails to conquer the planet this time. 

Meanwhile, in Marlow, there have been plenty of mysterious disappearances, gruesome zombie-related deaths, and UFO sightings, but the authorities in charge seem unwilling or unable to do anything useful about any of it. Then, without warning, the completely bonkers military man Col. Harlan Talbit (a very loud Simon Reynolds) strides into town. It all ends in full-scale (and quite messy) war between the humans and the titular vampire zombies from space. Heh. "Titular." Actually, that brings me to my next point.

As other reviewers have noted, the single weakest aspect of Vampire Zombies... From Space is its overreliance on juvenile sex and bodily function jokes. And when I say "juvenile," I mean that these jokes are pitched at the eighth-grade level (and that's being generous). If your sense of humor has progressed beyond, say, Bazooka Joe comics, bathroom stall graffiti, and knock-knock jokes, you're going to find (much of) the comedy in Vampire Zombies to be tiresome and puerile. To be fair, Ed Wood's own sense of humor was often pretty childish, but the "comedic" content in Stasko's movie does become wearying after a while.

Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman, for instance, appears throughout the film as a pesky public masturbator who likes to peek through people's windows with a big, dopey grin on his face. There's really not much to this character. We get the basic "joke" after just one appearance. But Kaufman keeps reappearing throughout the entire running time, Even when he's not onscreen, the other characters are often heard talking about him. This gets progressively less and less funny over the course of the film. It's a textbook example of "diminishing returns." The same goes for a running joke in which Marlow's humorously corrupt mayor (Mark Lefebvre) keeps reciting campaign slogans that accidentally make him sound like a child molester. It's another one-note bit, and the script keeps hitting that note over and over. And then there are the innumerable references to vampires "sucking" their victims. Yeah, yeah, we get it. It sounds like you're talking about oral sex. Hilarious. Please, for the love of all that is decent and holy, move on.

Georgiou: Giving 110%.

The thing is, Vampire Zombies... From Space! doesn't need these cheap jokes because it already has so much going on, what with the flying saucers, vampires, zombies, and all. There's no need to put a hat on a hat. When I think back to the fake B-movies that work best, at least comedically speaking, they're the ones that let the innate absurdity of the material speak for itself and don't feel the need to add what I call "joke jokes" on top of it. Check out the title segment in Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) as an example. That's such an eerie evocation of real 1950s sci-fi movies that it could almost pass for the genuine article. Look, I have this whole theory about parodies I call the 110% Rule: you do 100% of what would be possible in the real thing, then go 10% past it. That's the sweet spot. Too often, Vampire Zombies goes way past the 110% mark.

That's not to say all the jokes in this movie fail. I definitely got some laughs out of this script, especially at the way the townspeople of Marlow eventually repel the vampire zombie hordes in the last act. It's a solution the movie had literally been suggesting since the very first scene, and yet it caught me by surprise when it happened. And the movie has great fun with its special effects. One of the best and most inventive sequences in the film involves a character who is bisected and whose upper and lower body then operate independently. It reminded me of something you'd see in The Return of the Living Dead (1985) or Re-Animator (1985). (If you love either of those movies, you'll probably enjoy this one.)

Amid all the wackiness and histrionics, the movie's funniest performance is actually delivered by Oliver Georgiou as Wayne, a brooding bad boy in the James Dean/Marlon Brando tradition. He's right at that 110% mark I mentioned earlier, spitting out his ridiculous dialogue as if he truly believed in it. For me, his performance evokes Johnny Depp in both Ed Wood (1994) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Oh, while we're on this topic, I appreciated that a member of Wayne's gang (Dink, played by Tyler Collie) constantly wears 3D glasses as if they were sunglasses. I think that's meant as a nod to Casey Siemaszko's character in Back to the Future (1985).

If you're still reading this article, you probably want to know how much Ed Wood content there is in Vampire Zombies.... From Space! Rest assured, there's a bunch. The idea for this movie began not with director Michael Stasko but with screenwriter Jakob Skrzypa, who began writing it when he was in high school. (That, I can totally believe.) One of his major inspirations was Plan 9 from Outer Space. As I said earlier, Vampire Zombies combines the tropes of zombie movies, vampire movies, and alien invasion movies in a manner that is extremely reminiscent of Plan 9. 

Get it? Huh? Do ya?

And the similarities do not end there. For one thing, the entire story is told as a police procedural. Throughout the film, we tag along with cynical, liquor-swilling Chief Ed Clarke (Andrew Bee) and his more open-minded partner Officer James Wallace (Rashaun Baldeo). Have you already guessed that these two plainclothesmen spend a lot of time schlepping through the local graveyard? The uniformed policemen in Marlow are the usual bumblers and nitwits you'd expect in a movie of this nature, very much in the Paul Marco/Conrad Brooks tradition. 

Do you need your Ed Wood references to be more blatant than that? Does it help that an entire scene of this movie takes place at a business called "Ed's Wood and Hardware"? How about the fact that a member of the vampire council is Vampira, as portrayed by Judith O'Dea of Night of the Living Dead (1968) fame? Yes, Barbara from NOTLD is playing Vampira! Truthfully, the vampire council is one of my favorite aspects of the entire film. Besides Vampira, the other two members of the group are Nosferatu (played by legendary puppeteer David Liebe Hart) and Coppola's Dracula (played by Martin Ouellette). This entire subplot reminded me a great deal of What We Do in the Shadows (2019-2024), a series I'm sure Ed Wood would have loved and been amazed by.

What really ties this movie to Edward D. Wood, Jr. is just its overall "let's put on a show" vibe. While watching Vampire Zombies... From Space!, I imagined that many friends and relatives of the crew were recruited to work on this movie or make cameos in it. I'm sure that this project ate up lots of nights and weekends. I know every aspect of the production, from scouting locations to securing distribution, was a struggle in one sense or another. And yet, somehow, they got it done. Like Ed got it done. May God help them in the future.