Blood Suckers from Outer Space (1984)

This low budget ‘80s flick tells the story of an alien invasion in rural Texas.  See the aliens (basically a gas cloud) swoops down on the locals inhabits them and drains their blood.  Then they use the body as transportation sneaking around killing others for the blood that they need to survive.  Yep so the aliens kill people and make them vampires!  Before you know it there are space vampires, or as this movie calls them Blood Suckers from Outer Space walking all over the place.  Lucky for us all the Army has a plan to stop the invasion, that is if the president, played by Pat Paulsen, will take enough time to approve it!  Now if our hero and his girlfriend can just escape the blast radius it will be all good.

I had a chance to meet Glen Coburn, the director of this movie, at a recent Cinema Wasteland and he was a very nice guy.  But honestly even though I love cheesy low budget horror movies I just couldn’t get into this one.  The pacing is just dreadful and at times it seems the filmmakers are just grasping at stuff to pad the movie out.  There are a couple of plots going on here.  You have a group of characters that are stuck in the middle of the craziness that is happening.  This includes a photographer for the local newspaper who has some family issues and the random camero driving nitrous huffing girl that picks him up.  This is the most interesting of the stories and it takes up most of the runtime.  But then there is a subplot with scientists working on one of the Blood Suckers that really goes nowhere.  It is annoying because every time that movie seems to pick up some steam and get interesting we switch to these pointless characters. 

Now this is a low budget movie.  So you get exactly what you would expect.  Bad acting (for the most part), lighting, sound, and camera work all are present here.  But I will admit it is also pretty obvious that the filmmakers and crew were having some fun.  There are some funny lines about the incidental music and I will admit that I was laughing pretty hard at the fight scene between the photographer and his uncle (I think it was his uncle anyways…).  I also thought that some of the cheesy special effects worked pretty well in a goofy sort of way.  In the end though it wasn’t enough for me to really like or want to ever revisit this movie.

Yeah I know this movie isn’t supposed to be taken seriously.  The plot and dialogue is all very silly.  And this movie has a super low budget and a cameo from Pat Paulsen.  I get it okay.  But being low budget and/or silly isn’t an excuse for poor writing and pacing.  I wanted to like this flick, but it just isn’t very good. 

1 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2010 John Shatzer