• Straight to Video
• Director: Glen Coburn
• Written by: Glen Coburn
• Running Time: 79 minutes
• Language: English
• MPAA Rating: UNRATED
• Cast: Thom Meyers, Robert Bradeen, Pat Paulsen, Laura Ellis, Dan Gallion, Big John Brigham, Glen Coburn, Franny Coppenbarger, Christine Crowe, Joyce Dixon, Dan Gallion, Rick Garlington, Wayne Greene, Christopher Heldman, Billie Keller, Paul LaRocque, Dennis Letts, Kris Nicolau-Sharpley, Jim Stafford, Darrell Shelton, Julie P. Oliver-Touchstone, Richard Wainscott, John Webb, Samantha Walker, Jack Wilkinson

Glen Coburn's "Blood Suckers from Outer Space" is a satirical comedy/sci fi oddity that, despite having a lot to say politically, in a comic sense it only works about half of the time. Very few of the jokes are actually funny, and the wink wink nature of the script goes from amusing to annoying pretty quickly. Granted, while I found myself not really enjoying the comedy that much, I did enjoy the traditional horror stuff.

When the film opens, a large gust of wind rips through a small Texas town. Alien invasion coming in the form of an airborne virus, which, when inhaled by an elderly gent standing in his yard, drops him to his knees in agony. Soon he's vomiting up gallons of blood; the transformation has began, and it won't stop until the whole of the community has been afflicted. Thankfully, the local newspaper photographer Jeff Rhodes (Thom Meyers) has got the scoop, but before he can bust the story wide open, he has to choose between life as a farmer (and keeping his inheritance), or staying with the cool photographer gig he has. Undermining his dreams is his Uncle Joe (Robert Bradeen), a guy so right wing nutty he won't watch the nudie channels on the satellite for fear the "commies" might be able to see him in his living room. He's so adamant that Jeff pick up his slack on the farm that he threatens to cut him off in every way. Ironically, it was Joe who gave Jeff his first camera, pushing Jeff towards his chosen career path. Knowing that he'll have to decide by dinner time, a frustrated Jeff zips off in his car only to end up with a blown tire. Soon those frustrations are boiling over in the form of vehicular homicide, literally. Yes, like a petulant child, Jeff puts crowbar to metal and completely demolishes his car. Thankfully, local gal, Julie (Laura Ellis), just happens to be driving by his strip of county road. She's a nice girl who promptly offers Jeff a ride (against her better instincts I'm guessing, considering that he just went ape shit on his car) and a hit from the nitrous oxide tank she has sitting in her backseat. Yes, you read that right, Julie has nitrous oxide tank in her backseat... that she uses to get high with. Anyhoo, these two pretty much Scooby Do it around town getting high, having sex and fighting off bloodthirsty locals, before figuring out a way to immobilize the effects of the alien wind thus saving the populace. Hint: it has something to do with that nitrous tank.

The film also involves two subplots, both of which run parallel with the main one. The first of which involves Jeff's scientist brother Ralph (played by writer and director Jeff Coburn) who has been conducting experiments on one of those alien vampires - a former colleague of Ralph's, Dr. Pace (John Webb), along with his fellow contemporaries, just down the road at a lab known as Research City. While these "scientists" aren't exactly the conventional straight-laced monotone lot we've come to expect from films of this type, they do make for some interesting (not funny, mind you) scenes; namely their penchant for getting high and drunk while on duty. They don't provide much story-wise outside of establishing the essence of what makes the vampires tick (and maybe a glimpse into their plans for terraforming Earth). I'll admit, the brief segment involving Pace giving a lecture to a room full of corpses was quite chilling and probably the film's scariest moment.

Representing the military presence (and second subplot) is the gruff, cigar chomping General Sanders (Dennis Letts), a one dimensional war-mongering lunatic stereotype in the same vein as Goerge C. Scott in "Strangelove". He's adamant that a nuclear bomb should be commissioned to deal with the vampire/zombie threat. "We have them, so we should use them," he reasons, forgetting, of course, the legal ramifications and the human cost of deploying such a weapon. Following a tantrum in which he berates a horn dog President (comedian Pat Paulsen, in a cameo) to the point that he allows him to use the weapon as long as he promises not to call him anymore. Chilling is the verbal golden chestnuts Sanders uses to justify killing thousands of Americans, namely the desire to "protect America's freedom". Some of his lines, clearly satirical, and written more than fifteen years prior, were recited verbatim by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush in their run up to sell the Iraq war. Pretty frightening if you ask me. The culmination of his actions result in one of the coolest scenes in a zombie movie, as Jeff and Julie make kissy face while a giant nuclear mushroom cloud forms in the backdrop (accompanied by a cheerful pop song which engulfs the soundtrack) "Watchmen" anyone?

As I said earlier, the film includes one too many moments in which the fourth wall is broken, namely actors winking at the camera or, in one instance, commenting on the song playing in the background. What starts out as moderately funny and clever grows more exasperating in a very short time. In a singular instance where the broken fourth wall does work happens midway into the film when Julie turns to the camera and comments, "I can't handle another Kung Fu scene." I had to agree, especially considering how badly choreographed the last one was. The make up and gore effects were okay, but considering how pale all the actors looked, I had trouble differentiating the infected from the non-infected. This probably has more to do with film stock, I guess. Some of the dialogue is very witty and requires a second screening to fully grasp, but good writing on occasion does not a good script make. Clearly Coburn was looking to recapture the spirit of those cheap b-grade exploitation drive in flicks of the past, and, in some sense, he nails it, but his never ending attempts at mugging comic script-wise for the camera is a buzz kill. He even appears to be pandering to the stoner crowd, the type of folks who generally appreciated moves about blood sucking vampires from outer space, by turning the typically straight-arrow scientists into bumbling potheads. Sadly, like so many other jokes (and in-jokes) in the film, this one fell flat.

Stoners and hardcore b-movie completists will surely find something to love about this long unattainable flick, but for most everyone else, I'm sure, this will be just another in a long line of groan inducers.