Your Daily Dracula – Craig Gloster, Vampire Zombies … From Space (2024)
This parody scrambles several decades of black and white horror/science fiction into one tabloid headline. Made in Canada, it melds elements from Invaders from Mars, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Invasion of the Saucer Men and Night of the Living Dead with some tipped-in vampire movie stuff to spice the mix. It’s less focused than a typical Larry Blamire film – Lost Skeleton of Cadavra remains the classic effort in this field – but director/co-writer Michael Stasko manages to make the disparate elements generally rub along well together. Even lopsided storytelling, lapses in taste and a few too many repetitions of several gags feel as much like homages to low-budget clumsy filmmaking rather than mistakes.
A family on a tobacco farm are buzzed by a plastic novelty item flying saucer. Venturing into a field to investigate, they find a cloaked Dracula (Craig Gloster), who has the UFO zap Mrs MacDowell into sludge. The town of Marlow dismisses the story and Mr MacDowell (Erik Helle) gets stuck with a reputation as a murderer. Ten years later, one of MacDowell’s daughters is harrassed by hoods while walking home from school, then dragged into the tobacco field and ripped apart by zombies. Mary (Jessica Antovski), her sister, is by default the heroine – while an alcoholic asshole police chief (Andrew Bee), a big city detective burned out after a UFO encounter (Rashaun Baldeo) and a sensitive juvenile delinquent (Goliver Georgiou) rise to various degrees of heroism as the zombie-vampire plague runs through the town. In an orbiting mothership, Dracula queens about like Ming the Merciless as he prepares to return to Earth – he was spooked off his first invasion attempt by a ‘T necklace’ (crucifix) but his nutso son Dylan (Robert Kemeny) has devised a vaccination for this weakness which has a side-effect of spreading the vampire-zombie strain.
This fairly whiny Dracula is being bossed by a holographic triumvirate from the vampire high council – played by Judith O’Dea (from NoLD) as Vampira, Martin Ouellette as Coppola’s Dracula and David Liebe Hart as Nosferatu. The film isn’t entirely free of Tromaesque mean-spiritedness – and Lloyd Kaufman has a cameo as Marlow’s second biggest nuisance, the Public Masturbator – but has a stream of daffy ideas (like Dracula’s bat-winged flying saucer or a ludicrous non sequitur about vampire aversion to tobacco), ridiculous gore taken to early Peter Jackson levels of splat, multiple bats on string, forcefully earnest performances and a combination of gross-out gags with cleverer stuff (a lack of reflection joke shows the false beard but not the vampire wearing it). It cleverly uses stock footage (including snippets of public domain classics Night of the Living Dead and White Zombie), miniatures, pantomime costumes and arch effects like Dracula’s highlit starey eyes.
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