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."