Citizens in a small farming community become blue-faced bloodsucking zombies. A hot chick from the city cruises into town, picks up a reporter off the side of the road, and they instantly hop into bed with one another. Once they venture back into town, they realize the situation and have to fend off attacks from the zombie bloodsuckers.
Bloodsuckers from Outer Space reminds me of the kind of movie you would see on Commander USA’s Groovie Movies back in the day. It’s the sort of horror comedy that with a few strategic edits would play just fine on TV on a Saturday afternoon. It often feels like a slightly more polished version of a Troma flick. That right there should be an effective litmus test for any potential viewer.
The problem with the humor is that the tone is inconsistent. Much of the time, it resembles your typical low-budget horror comedy. Other times it veers into Airplane! territory. (At one point a character stops and exclaims, “Damn, that incidental music is scary!”) Some of the oddball attempts at humor are endearing (like the janitor who just refers to everyone as a “weirdo”) while others fall flat. When it’s trying to be funny, the results are decidedly mixed. Instead, most of the laughs it manages to get are unintentional. Then again, that’s not such a bad thing. I mean, at least I was laughing.
The horror side of the horror comedy coin is just as uneven, though no less entertaining. Although much of the extraterrestrial zombie carnage is relatively lightweight, there are still a few gore highlights. We get blood puking, an arm is hacked off, and there’s a decapitation. I also liked the scene where the alien zombie leader was giving a symposium to a bunch of corpses. Plus, you’ve got to give it points for using the ending of Return of the Living Dead before Return of the Living Dead did.
AKA: Horror Academy 1. AKA: Transformer.
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