The B-movie salute is wrapping up an award-winning festival tour.
VAMPIRE ZOMBIES…FROM SPACE! (see exclusive stills below) has played over 15 fests, taking Best Feature Film at Atlanta’s Buried Alive Film Festival, Canada’s Terror in the Bay and Austria’s Fright Nights, along with Audience Choice and Best Directing at Canada’s Hellifax Horror Fest. It’s the brainchild of Jakob Skrzypa, who scripted with Alex Forman and produced with Forman, Ted Bezaire and Gerry Lattmann. Michael Stasko directed, and the cast is headed by Andrew Bee, Rashaun Baldeo, Oliver Georgiou, Jessica Antovski, Craig Gloster and Rob Kemeny, with appearances by NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD’s Judith O’Dea, Troma icon Lloyd Kaufman, TIM & ERIC regular David Liebe Hart and SAW IV and GATE 2’s Simon Reynolds, with voice work from TOTALLY KILLER’s Andrew Barber.
Shot in black and white, with humor inspired by Mel Brooks, Monty Python and SOUTH PARK, the movie, according to the official synopsis, “is a heartfelt tribute to–and a hilarious parody of–1950s horror and sci-fi classics. The story follows an unlikely band of heroes as they unite to defend their small town from an invasion of sinister space vampires.”
“VAMPIRE ZOMBIES…FROM SPACE! began way back in 2010, when I was in high school,” Skrzypa tells RUE MORGUE. “Around this time I was introduced to the films of Ed Wood, specifically PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. I felt this film was ripe for parody, with its use of miniatures and very visible strings. More importantly, it looked like something a group of grade-10 high-schoolers could make. So I wrote a script, and we spent weekends shooting the film. Unfortunately, much of the footage was on Mini DV tapes, which our friend who owned the camera…deleted.
“That should’ve been the end of the project,” he continues, “but around 2017 I found a crumpled physical copy of that grade 10 script, and brought it to original VAMPIRE ZOMBIES actor, now my writing partner, Alex Forman, and thought we’d go over it for laughs. Laughs were exactly what we got; sure, the humor was juvenile, but so were we! We found enough merit in the material to rewrite it and shape more of a story, while preserving the original concept of paying loving homage to, while totally lampooning, 1950s horror and sci-fi.
“It was this version of the screenplay that we brought to Mike Stasko, a professor at the university in our home town who had made some films. He loved the script, and was very keen to make the film. The three of us worked on it a bit more, and we were set to begin shooting in 2020; then some small global disaster intervened. We finally shot the movie in 2022, and did some pickup days, which I directed, in 2023.”
For more on VAMPIRE ZOMBIES…FROM SPACE!, head over to its official website.
