EvanEast

And a few more "no"s on top of that. Voodoo Academy is, without a doubt, the least ambitious film of all time. What exactly is it trying to do? Tell a story? Obviously not; as has been pointed out, most of it's just barely-legal guys rubbing themselves. Could it, then, be an attempt at subversive homoeroticism? Well, maybe, if not for the fact it never ever ever goes beyond the most innocuous and nonthreatening forms of male contact. (Which is, to the delight of none, repeated about eighty thousand times.) Well, it is sort of a horror movie; is it trying to scare us? Not unless the director meant to do so through the utter tedium and vacuousness of his "work."

Never in my life have I enjoyed a movie less. This is the most boring and unnecessary thing I've ever seen. It's like Voodoo Academy takes the genres of horror, zombie, and gay movies, puts them in a grinder, then runs them through a coffee filter--only instead of it being the kind of coffee filter that filters out coffee beans, it's the kind that takes out everything vital, edgy, or in any way interesting. The result is 74 minutes of film every bit as exciting as a glass of warm water--only without the ability to rehydrate you after the 10-day gin binge that will inevitably befall you if you watch this abomination of human effort.

Let's just make this clear: you might think a movie like Robot Ninja would be one of those transcendent B-movies that's good despite its non-existent budget, or that, failing that, it would be so bad and goofy that it would end up being hysterically funny and therefore a good time to be had by all.

But if you thought that, you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. Because watching the entirety of Robot Ninja will annihilate your very soul. I mean, I like camp as much as the next guy, but what I DON'T like is an hour and a half of pure torture, and there's simply no other way to describe this tenth circle of Hell. The only, only way I would ever recommend it is if you need to build up your tolerance for the worst movies of all time, so that you might be able to watch, say, Voodoo Academy without dying of lack-of-ambition poisoning, or Teenage Barbarians without succumbing to a fatal case of cultural shame. Other than that, stay far, far away.

In conclusion, Robot Ninja is the devil.

I've watched an awful lot of junky movies in my day, including 50+ zombie movies and a solid half of Troma's collection, and I can say this is definitely the best of the class of zombie movie describable only as "Good despite their every effort."

What I mean by this is it's obviously no Seven Samurai, but Hard Rock Zombies, unlike a great deal of other Z-movies out there, is entertaining and funny from start to finish. It's no Surf Nazis Must Die, which has a few memorable lines and scenes; it's definitely no Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, which is the worst squandering of an excellent title I've ever encounter. No, my friends, Hard Rock Zombies starts and ends with utter and inexplicable insanity--it's 90 minutes of gleeful weirdness with none of the attempts at a "serious story" or "dramatic arc" or any of the garbage that tends to take up a good deal of most good bad movies out there.

If you want to see an unqualifiedly good, funny zombie movie, watch Cemetery Man or Dead Alive. If you want to see solid, scary, gory zombies, watch Romero or Zombie or 28 Days Later.

But if, like me, you've waited your entire life for the trifecta of a midget Nazi zombie, Hard Rock Zombies is the movie for you.