Review: Hard Rock Zombies

Promising young hair band led by preening E.J. Curse head for the Conservative town of Grand Guignol to perform a gig, just around the same time that said town is planning on outlawing rock music. The band had previously been warned not to travel to the town by a hot chick, but they ignore the advice (hey, she’s just a chick, man!) because they’ve heard a record exec is going to be at the show. On the road, the band runs into another hot chick who lives in Grand Guignol and offers the band a place to stay at her family’s big ‘ol house. Turns out that her family are a bunch of whackos, murderers, Nazis (including a Hitler substitute), ‘little people’, and even a werewolf who may or may not be a still-living Eva Braun (!). People are murdered, resurrected as zombies, yadda yadda. You get the picture.

 

This 1985 zombie comedy from Krishna Shah (an Indian-American writer, director, and producer mostly on the stage) appears to have been schlock producer Cannon’s attempt at a Troma flick. The difference is, some Troma flicks were fun (“Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD”, “Tromeo and Juliet”), not to mention pretty gory. This is just a lame-arse chore from start to finish, boring, meandering, unfunny, and totally uninteresting. Worse still, there’s barely any zombies (and the ones we do get look more like ghouls than zombies, not the same thing). Even Troma wouldn’t stoop so low as to call a film “Hard Rock Zombies” and not give us the damn zombies. Mind you, what do you expect from a film that gives us way more A in the T&A quotient? (I’m not knocking a bit of ‘A’, but seriously, why grab some ‘A’ when you got some lovely ‘T’ right there?).

 

The film is incredibly weird, but not in any entertaining way, unless old German couples, little people, Hitler parodies (with midget in tow, of course), tarantulas, and disembodied hands that come to life are your idea of entertainment. That last one, by the way, is the closest thing we get to a zombie for most of the film’s length. The Nazi stuff actually leads to a disgraceful and totally unfunny scene where the Hitler dude shows off his gas chamber. Even Mel ‘Springtime for Hitler’ Brooks wouldn’t be able to make that work comedically. I will say, though, that the music isn’t the worst I’ve found in a film like this, even if lead actor Curse looks like that campy Philip Bloch guy with longer hair and a “Cruising”-style handlebar moustache. Their music is fine if generic (and about as ‘Hard’ as Journey, including a song called ‘Cassie’ that sounds like KISS’s lame-o ballad ‘Shandi’), but their goofy antics are sooo not macho. And I’m a fan of Poison! The songs aren’t bad, though and were written by Paul Sabu, who also wrote the classic W.A.S.P. theme song from “Ghoulies II”, ‘Scream Until You Like It’. Meanwhile, given the glam rock motif, I’m surprised Tawny Kitaen isn’t in here somewhere dancing on a car bonnet and throwing her hair about.

 

The idea of the film isn’t bad, you could hire a local rock band (For argument’s sake, let’s call them The Cannon Group- thank you, thank you. I’m here all week!) who you can promise some free publicity to, and you’ve got yourself a cheap and potentially fun movie, so long as the script is good. The script here sucks, and even if the band were KISS, Cheap Trick, Def Leppard, Twisted Sister or Whitesnake, it wouldn’t suck any less (With KISS it might even suck more. Remember “KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park”?). Mind you, it might’ve worked as an extended film clip (like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”), if pared down a lot, and I always felt like Dio and Iron Maiden were tailor made for a horror film.

 

The height of hilarity here are a town called Grand Guignol (Ho, ho), a cute “Psycho” shower scene gag, and a Satanic musical finale (is that the dreaded ‘Tri-tone’ being played?) that is kinda amusing but not as much as it should be. Director Shah co-wrote the screenplay with David Allen Ball (who wrote Shah’s “American Drive-In”), presumably while watching “The Scooby Doo Mysteries” and the PMRC hearings on TV, and doing a lot of Quaaludes. That pretty much describes the plot of the film, really, with the Metal vs. Morality debate stuff being especially pointless here. I get what it’s a reference to but it takes forever for it to be even remotely integrated into the main plot. Meanwhile, the MTV montage thing is overused, getting old real fast, and it’s not even done very well. Just like the film overall, actually.

 

You’d have to be rat-faced (Ratt-faced?) drunk to get through this with any sense of enjoyment whatsoever. But that’s the Cannon Group for you. Seriously cheap, dull non-entertainment from the cheapo company behind almost every Michael Dudikoff movie ever made.

 

Rating: D-