La vengeance des morts-vivants

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.

You can guess it is not a movie to watch with high expectations, but there should be at least something for the actual fans of the genre i.e. extremely low budget zombie movies, rock'n'roll and the 80s as such. Sadly, there isn't. Technically speaking this production it is not even a movie, but a remade 20-minute piece and you can notice the desperation of the filmmakers trying to fill the other 78 minutes with anything at all, which included full songs played by the band on stage, totally random interludes and repeating the same video sequences. The unrelated scenes could disturb the plot and the logical course of events, if there were any, but in fact there wasn't much.

This movie is quite different from other zombie movies, surely it is gory and tasteless at moments, but for the most part it is incredibly boring and the things which make no sense are not even that funny. It can be quite a disappointment for hard rock and heavy metal fans (who are most likely to pick this movie: come on, zombies, Hitler and rock'n'roll) because it doesn't really feature the 80s' music they would listen to. The tracks are not hard rock and not even rock'n'roll. I liked the love ballad "Cassie's Song" though. I think I'll even give the movie an extra star for that (the base rating was 2 for "bad, but I managed to watch it till the end").

I find this movie a little too bad even for people specifically interested in bad movies. Unless things like Nazi zombie midgets really do it for you, then you totally should go for it.

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.

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.

Hey, even though I'm only a supporting player in this debacle, (I played the intellectual) I am utterly flattered by all the positive comments. You get it. Maybe I can go to horror film conventions and have a crappy table in the corner somewhere signing autographs for $5 when I'm in my seventies... For the rest of you: I hope you find some joy in your lives-SOMEWHERE!! We were out to have fun and we did. BTW-I watched close-up and first hand much of the second unit photography and the effects were AWESOME!! John Carl Buechler was the guy doing all that stuff and he was also the second unit director and steadicam operator. If you don't believe he was up to the task of making the effects better than they are in this film, check out his credits on IMDb. While I was on set, news arrived that the film lab had accidentally destroyed most of the second unit's film. Bittersweet-lost forever to the dozens who would witness the film, insurance payoff meant that the film had already turned a profit...