Hard Rock Zombies

I recently watched Hard Rock Zombies (1984) on Shudder. The storyline follows a rock band that stops in the wrong town, plagued by curses, Nazis, and midgets. A young lady in town falls in love with the singer, but unfortunately, the band is killed. She uses a curse to bring the band back to life to try and save the town.

Directed by Krishna Shah (American Drive-In), Hard Rock Zombies stars E. J. Curse (Late Last Night), Ted Wells (Saint Nick), Phil Fondacaro (Willow), Richard Vidan (Terminator 2), and David O'Hara (Biohazard).

This is one of those movies where you keep asking yourself, "What did I just see?" as you watch it unfold. The costumes, settings, and soundtrack all work for the premise. The makeup for the zombies looks like I could have done it, and there are some bad montages. However, there's also a werewolf with two switchblades, Nazi midgets that eat cows, elements of puppet masters, and a great ending. The props are hit or miss and had me cracking up throughout; there's a scene where Arthur has the worst "branch" prop I've ever seen. Despite this, the ending is worth the journey, making it one of those "so bad it's good" films.

In conclusion, Hard Rock Zombies is an absolute mess with enough worthwhile elements to make it enjoyable. I would score this a 6/10 and recommend seeing it once.

Travelling to the redneck town of Grand Guignol, where they hope to impress a music mogul with their next show, a heavy rock band pick up a beautiful hitch-hiker who invites them to stay at her home, which she shares with her bizarre family. Once in town, the band runs into trouble with the authorities, and lead singer Jessie falls in love with local girl Cassie, but the band's outrageous rock 'n' roll antics and Jessie's blossoming romance are short lived: the musicians are murdered one-by-one by their strange hosts, who turn out to be a bunch of bloodthirsty ghouls led by none other than Adolf Hitler!

Following the band's funeral, a distraught Cassie plays Jessie's last recording—music inspired by an ancient magical book that has the power to raise the dead—which results in the pasty faced foursome clawing their way from their graves to seek revenge, and to play one last gig.

When I first saw Hard Rock Zombies, on its original video release over 20 years ago, I thought it was absolutely awful; these days, I find the film slightly more bearable thanks to its nostalgia factor (gotta love all that big hair rock!) and my unhealthy love of cheesy 80s crap. However, I still struggle to understand what the hell its makers were thinking of: were they intentionally aiming for cult status with this insane mix of rock and horror, or is the film a genuinely inept, asinine piece of trash made by a bunch of totally talentless fools? The jury is still out on that one...

The film starts off promisingly, quickly scoring points for gratuitous use of both nudity and dwarfs, but rapidly becomes a jaw-droppingly bad mish-mash of musical interludes and inept gore (courtesy of FX man John Carl Buechler), interspersed with moments of complete inanity: the dwarfs watch on as an old man (later to be revealed as Hitler) shtups his wife; the old lady turns into a werewolf; the hitch-hiker dances to herself for no reason in the desert; one dwarf eats himself; the band survive an electrocution while practising; and one guy momentarily avoids being eaten by pretending to be a zombie (beating Shaun Of The Dead to the joke by a couple of decades).

It's all utter garbage, of course, but somehow strangely compelling.

I had the pleasure of viewing yet another odd addition to the zombie horror genre: Hard Rock Zombies. Our movie starts out with some blond chick hitch-hiking on the highway who then gets picked up by 2 guys in a sports car, goes skinny dipping with them, and then kills them both while a man accompanied by 2 weird midgets (one of which is deformed) photographs the entire event. Then we are introduced to the main characters of our flick, a rock band, led by Jessie who is the bass player and lead singer. They're jamming at a gig and then head into a back room after the show to have some fun with the groupies. While in the back room, a strange girl named Cassie warns Jessie not to play their next gig in this town called Grand Guignol. When he asks for an explanation she doesn't give him one and leaves Jessie hanging. Problem is, they can't skip the next town because a big shot talent scout is going to be there to watch the show.

So they go to Grand Guignol anyways even though they've been warned. On the way, Jessie is fumbling around with an ancient incantation he found while playing it over a rock bass line. They show up in the town, which is composed of stereotypical local yokel folks, and dance around. Yes, that's right - dance around. See, Hard Rock Zombies is also a musical and whenever the movie takes you into a musical number it's shot like a music video. This is pretty hilarious since the music is standard cheese ball 80's stuff and the antics in the video are lame at best. Still, I'm laughing.

Well, wouldn't you know, the same blond chick from the opening scene lives there and offers to put the band up in her mansion vice the local hotel. They accept since every one of the members wants to nail her except for Jessie who is falling for the odd Cassie girl. Unbeknownest to our heroes, Adolph Hitler, Eva Braun (who is also a werewolf), and the photographer with his 2 weird midgets also live in the mansion. The town is also not happy that they've arrived and quickly pass a measure to ban all rock and roll music at a town meeting. Jessie finds out that his incantation is effective for bringing the dead back to life after fooling around with it in his room. He then records it with his bass line and tells Cassie to play the tape at their graves should something tragic happen to him and the band.

Sure enough, Adolph and his buddies kill the entire band in various ways including one scene that's an obvious tribute to Hitchcock's "Psycho". The heart broken Cassie laments at Jessie's grave and then plays the tape. Voila! Our heroes emerge from the grave, looking paler, and proceed to walk and dance around the town like robots. Yes, that's right, LIKE ROBOTS. The standard groaning, lumbering slowly, and arms straight out zombie gait does not apply here. Oh yeah, and this is set to another cool song with the accompanying music video. Groovy!

Our heroes take revenge on their antagonizers and then play their gig to an audience of one: the talent scout. Another music video accompanies this bit and it's a sentimental ballad dedicated to Cassie. Things get crazier from there. More people come back from the dead and the deformed midget sits at the dinner table and decides to eat HIMSELF. The town residents go into a panic and devise humorous ways to defeat the zombies. Finally one person convinces the rest that they need a virgin to be ravished by the zombies at midnight on a full moon so that the zombies will slumber for 100 years. Guess who the virgin is?

I won't give away the ending but the deformed midget does succeed in eating himself and Hitler's gas chamber makes an appearance. Hard Rock Zombies has gotten crap reviews on almost every site that I looked at. Well, I think that what these people were missing was that Hard Rock Zombies is not a movie to be taken seriously. This is strictly campy fun and I got quite a few laughs from it. Hard Rock Zombies succeeds as a horror based comedy, not by design, but only by serendipity.

I believe that it was the directors intent to revive the flagging musical genre, and combine it with a cheesy horror plot line. My Brother and I first saw this movie back in the mid 80's , and it was the title that first grabbed my attention as a denim wearing metal head. I watched the movie then and thought it was crap, though the bass line that bought things back to life was brilliant. This movie then fell into obscurity and I have not given it a thought for the near on 20 years since. The other night I saw that Hard Rock Zombies was on the Horror Channel, and the vague memory of a mulleted bass player killing a spider and then bringing it back to life again struck in my mind. I decided to watch it again hoping that the passage of the years would make me understand what was once a nonsensical plot a bit more and hopefully make this painfully bad movie better. So on a nostalgia trip, I decided to record this drivel of a movie, after necking a few cans of strong lager to muster the dutch courage required to face this 80's timewarp, I sat down to watch, and guess what?.......It's still a crap movie, the plot is no easier to understand, the old man that looks like Scottie from Star Trek that half way through turns into Hitler is just absurd, the mulleted bass player looks a little dated now, but that riff is still brilliant. Give this movie a wide arc. If I were to recommend this movie to anyone, deaf and blind people would be at the top of my list as well as people suffering from chronic insomnia. easy contender for the biggest waste of everyone's time and labour EVER. best part(s) the blonde hitchhiker girl in the shower......worth watching for that alone.

Anyone going into this movie looking for a blood curdling shocker is barking up the wrong tree here. The title of the movie should tell you that. On the other hand, if you want to feel the tears run down your cheeks from incredulous laughter and your throat get sore with the groaning at the awful sight that's facing you, then maybe you will be able to suffer it.

Rock star wannabes who maybe should have found out what music is first, a dwarf Nazi zombie, a re-incarnated Adolf Hitler, a few dim bimbos, terrible audio and visual and you have everything you could possibly want!

Great lines, including a girl picking up her boyfriend's head and asking if he's OK are priceless. I take my hat off to the scriptwriter for having the front to write this stuff down.

Anyway people, it's one you have to take as you find and enjoy for the rubbish that it is. It is bad horror at it's finest.