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analogscum · 6 years

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HARD ROCK ZOMBIES (1985, d. Krishna Shah)

NOTE: I RECOMMEND WATCHING HARD ROCK ZOMBIES BEFORE READING THIS REVIEW IF YOU WANT TO AVOID SPOILERS!

Human ambition is a funny thing. It can lead to great triumphs, but also great tragedies. Without human ambition, we would not have rock n’ roll, the most vital of American art forms. On the other hand, human ambition also lead the Third Reich to exterminate more than six million Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped, and Romani people. How does this tie in to today’s film, Hard Rock Zombies? Well, for now, let’s just say that it is a testament to both sides of the coin of human ambition that the sickos who made Hard Rock Zombies said to themselves, we’re going to make Hard Rock Zombies…and then actually went out and made Hard Rock Zombies. I’m honestly not sure if I mean that as a compliment or not.

We open on two metalheads riding a T-Bird convertible down a winding desert road. Lo and behold, they stumble upon a buh-buh-buh-baaaaabe hitchhiking. What are they gonna do, NOT invite this bodacious blonde into their sweet ride? We now cut to a dwarf with an eyepatch and a troll dancing around with a guy holding a camera by a river. You read that right. The metalheads and the blonde pull up on the other side of the river, strip down to their skivvies, and do a little skinny dipping. Suddenly, she drowns each of them one by one! And also does something else, because the water turns blood red, but I have no idea what that could be. The camera guy takes pictures of this gristly scene, while the dwarf and the troll celebrate the carnage. They chop off one of the victims’ hands, blondie picks it up and sings “I wanna hold your hand.” Again, you read all of that right.

Cut to: our heroes, the band, whom the movie never bothers to name (seriously, this band has no name), rockin’ out before a sold out crowd. Right away, we’re confronted with the major problem of all of these 80s metal horror movies: these guys just do not sufficiently rock. I mean, they have a synth player, for cryin’ out loud! This was not too long after Van Halen risked losing their metal fanbase by adding synths to “Jump,” because synths were pop, and pop was for pussies. But seriously, these guys make Billy Joel sound like Napalm Death. Oh well, at least the crowd of roughly 12 people seems to be having a good time.

Backstage, the band strip down to their banana hammocks, and their manager, Ron, tells them that they have to have their photos taken with a bunch of groupies. None of the dudes in the band, especially the lead singer, Jesse, seem to want to do this. They’re incredibly ambivalent about potentially sleeping with these women. Which of course is par for the course for 80s metal bands. Most of Motley Crue’s autobiography, The Dirt, is about the dudes politely sipping Earl Grey tea and discussing Nietzsche. We soon get an idea as to why Jesse is not interested in all of these women who want to ride his mullet, and believe me, you’re not gonna like it.

As he’s escaping all of these annoying women who wanna show him their boobs, Jesse runs into Cassie. Now, the movie is not entirely clear on how old Cassie is supposed to be, but let’s just say she’s young. Like, teenage. Like, below the age of consent. She warns Jesse to stay out of the town of Grand Guignol (subtle), where the band is scheduled to play the next night. Jesse instantly falls in love with her, because this movie hates you, and we’re treated to white hot, sexually charged flirting such as this:

Jessie: You're neat.

Cassie: No, I'm not.

Jessie: Yeah, ya are.

Cassie: ...shakes head...

Jessie: Yeah, ya are.

Guys, it’s rare that I make a point of writing down dialogue in these movies that we talk about, but Hard Rock Zombies left me with no choice but to slam that pause button and record some of these lines, because holy macaroni, peep this screenwriting magic:

“I got it from a book. You know, a boooooooook?”

“You guys ready for the show? The loud show? Loud music show? Rock and roll?!?!”

“Oh bullshit, young stupid!”

“You suck, mister! I know it and everyone knows it!”

Eat your heart out, Aaron Sorkin!

So the band arrives in Grand Guignol, and wouldn’t you know it, they pick up the same hitchhiking blonde, who invites them to stay at her family’s mansion. The family is pretty normal, you’ve got blondie, the photographer, the dwarf, the troll, the groundskeeper who, um, is that a Swastika armband he’s wearing, and grandma and grandpa, who speak in thick German accents and we meet them while they’re in the bone zone and the dwarf and the troll are watching them. Oh, and by the way, they’re secretly Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, and Eva Braun is a werewolf. I PROMISE THAT ALL OF THIS IS TRUE.

As it turns out, everyone in Grand Guignol is a backwards rube who thinks that rock n’ roll is the devil’s music that will lead to “physical sex” (again, actual quote). So they get super duper outraged when the band engages in some antics that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of The Monkees. They skateboard around, do silly dances, and mug for the camera. The sheriff throws them in jail, the town council cancels their concert, and outlaw all rock n’ roll in general, leading to a scene where everyone throws their records and tapes in a pile and destroys them (again, subtle).

Meanwhile, Jesse and Cassie keep running into each other and falling deeper and deeper in love, and the movie keeps rubbing our faces in their obvious age difference, because apparently the overt Nazi imagery wasn’t cringeworthy enough. Just wait until we get to the song he writes about her, because you’ll have to go to jail once you hear it. They practice at the creepy mansion, and the family tries to electrocute them. That doesn’t work, so instead they murder the band members one by one overnight. The drummer is stabbed in a terrible homage to the Psycho shower scene, the keyboardist is felled by werewolf Eva Braun, I don’t remember what happens to the guitarist, I think he falls out of a window or something, and Jesse is crucified and disembowled with a weed hacker by the groundskeeper. This means Hitler is finally ready to turn California into the fourth reich…here we go…no turning back…complete with gas chambers. Which come into play later. THIS IS ALL FROM A REAL MOVIE THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Luckily, before he croaked, Jesse gave Cassie a tape he made of a bass lick that can raise the dead. Look, just roll with me here, ok? You’ve made it this far. So Cassie plays the tape at the band’s grave, and they rise from the dead, ready to get revenge on Hitler and Eva Braun and co. In zombie form, they all sport weird mime makeup that kinda looks like KISS in the early days before they figured out their image, and they walk around as if they’re doing a combination of the robot and the Macarena. These are both choices that the filmmakers made. So they pretty much instantly murderize the Hitler clan with no problems, but whoops, they don’t stay dead for long, because now they’re zombies too, and they’re attacking all the hicks in town, which makes THEM zombies. Now we’ve got Nazi zombies and redneck zombies running around, which is not an ideal situation to say the least, but for now, the band have to go play their big gig.

This is where we finally get to hear Jesse’s love ballad to Cassie in it’s entirety, and, well, here it is…

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“I’m so in love, but you’re so young.” BARF BARF BARF BARF ETERNAL BARF. Anyway, see ya in jail, which is where I live now because of this song!

I’m really loathe to talk about the rest of the movie, because at this point, it takes a turn into goofy comedy, and just completely falls flat. Not that their satirical bits about the PMRC and anti-metal hysteria were all that biting, but at least they were trying to say something, whereas these Zucker brothers-lite groaners are just insufferable. There’s a gag about a girlfriend who’s so possessive of her boyfriend that she won’t let any other women get near his severed head after a zombie rips it off, which the filmmakers obviously thought was beyond hilarious, but is really torturous. Then there’s an even less funny gag where some Pointdexter is like, hey, since zombies are brainless, they must be, like, allergic to brains? So if we all walk around with these giant cardboard cutout heads, they’ll leave us alone? Huh? And of course it doesn’t work, and of course the zombies just eat everybody, and as he’s being devoured, the Pointdexter yells, “Don’t believe everything you read!” Ugggh, read this: you suck, movie.

OK, there is one running gag from this section that I liked: after the troll becomes a zombie, he just eats his own body until he’s a burping skull. I happened to think that was charming and great.

Eventually the townsfolk try to sacrifice Cassie to the zombies, because they read that if the undead feast upon a virgin, then they’ll rest for another hundred years. Whatever. So Cassie is totally about to be gang banged and devoured by zombie Hitler and his gang (wow, what a sentence), when luckily the band shows up, and lures them away by playing that resurrection riff that Jesse learned from a book (you know, a booooooook?!?!) And where do they lure them? Ugh, sorry…here goes…they lure them to the gas chambers, where they’re all gassed to death. You know, like in the Holocaust? I have nothing more to say.

The film ends, in perfect fashion, by spelling co-writer/director Krishna Shah’s name wrong in the credits. Fantastic.

When a movie looks particularly bad, I often like to say that it reminds me of a fake movie meant to play in the background of a real movie. Well, as it turns out, that’s the actual origin story of Hard Rock Zombies. Originally, the film was supposed to be 20 minutes long and featured as the movie the characters in another Krishna Shah production, American Drive-In, go to see. Apparently Shah decided at some point that he could double his profits by turning Hard Rock Zombies into its own feature film. This begs the question: is this where all the Nazi stuff was added? Because it’s easy to imagine characters in a movie occasionally checking in with the drive-in movie and seeing a bunch of rockers rising from the grave, but that Hitler subplot is just so bizarre and so incongruous that I can’t help but think it was tacked on.

Hard Rock Zombies is the craziest film I’ve seen in awhile. It approaches Demonwarp and Spookies levels of what the hell am I watching madness. You genuinely will not be able to predict where this movie is gonna go from scene to scene. However, the tacked on nature of that madness keeps you at arms length a bit, and eventually it just becomes tiresome once you realize it’s not going anywhere beyond mere shock value. I mean, this movie is nearly an hour and forty minutes, and ends with a scene in a goddamn GAS CHAMBER. So, by all means, show this one to your friends, just don’t blame me if they never talk to you again. You may be right, they may be crazy, but in the end, it’s still rock n’ roll to me.

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