Revenge of the Revenant Review 19: The one that started as another movie's joke

 

Title: Hard Rock Zombies

What Year?: 1985

Classification: Unnatural Experiment/ Evil Twin

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

I’m back with another zombie movie review, closer together than they’ve been since I did the first 12 for my “main” list. Because coincidence is a harsh mistress, I have another one I “had” to do, and it’s one that genuinely made me wonder if I was too hard on The Beyond. (No, I wasn’t.) It is one of the strangest I have considered for the feature, with an even stranger production history, but it has the unfortunate further distinction of failing to translate this into a relatively good movie. With that, I present Hard Rock Zombies, a movie where the zombies do indeed rock, but whether they do it hard is open for debate.

Our story begins with a rocker named Jessie and his band that is clearly never getting off the ground on the way to their next gig, despite a warning from a teenish admirer. As it turns out, the townspeople are haters who murder the lot of them, without considering that this is probably doing the artform a favor. However, their admirer Cassie plays a recording at their graves that brings them back to life. Naturally, they take their revenge on their murderers, including  patriarch who turns out to be none other than Hitler. More surprisingly, they still show up to perform for a talent scout. Meanwhile, the Nazis they dispatch come back to life and start munching on townspeople, who are helpless despite (if not because of) advice from several inexplicably well-read experts on the undead. Soon, the zombies are after Cassie, for reasons that are best written off as incoherent. It’s up to Jessie and the band to save her from the disaster they started!

Hard Rock Zombies was directed and cowritten by Krishna Shah, a Bombay-born émigré who worked mainly in TV and documentaries. The film was made in 1983 an expansion of a “movie within a movie” originally filmed for his own film American Drive-In; both were ultimately released in 1985. The role of Jessie was given to E.J. Curse, a bassist for the band Silent Rage. Midget Phil Fondacaro appeared in both Hard Rock Zombies and American Drive-In, with the latter film referencing his role as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi.  The finished film was distributed by the Cannon Group (why do I bother?). It was released on DVD in 2004, by an operation identified as Blue Laser; this version is in “full screen” format and may be a transfer from VHS. As of this writing, it remains available in Netflix’s disc catalog.

For my experiences, I heard of this one from the Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, but didn’t get to it until well within the last 3 or 4 years. In hindsight, a big part of this was that it never felt appealing to me. I was so far out of the ‘80s music scene that I literally hear more of it now than in the actual 1980s, and I still have only ever gotten into a few artists. (The Pretenders and Blondie rule.) As for the zombies, it was clear from casual descriptions that this was the opposite of what I got into the genre for. As I keep saying, the kind of zombie movie I appreciate most are the ones with tight, “traditional” narratives, whereas this one is willful chaos. Once I got a look at it, I quickly concluded that even compared to other movies in this general style, especially Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and the eerily similar Chopper Chicks In Zombietown, this is inferior in both coherence and overall quality, to the point that I debated whether I had finally found a movie “too bad” for this feature. I forged ahead because this is the one that I simply couldn’t leave out, based on oddity alone, and because this is one you simply don’t go through without telling the tale.

To give this movie a proper appraisal, it’s necessary to start with the story and the main characters, which in a movie like this is practically counterintuitive. Plenty has already been said about whether the band qualifies as “hard rock” or for that matter “rock”. For me, it will be sufficient to say that even I can tell their style owes more to the 1970s and even the ‘60s than contemporary “heavy metal”, and I consider this the main reason the music is at least intermittently listenable. (To really understand, you would have to have survived the ‘90s rap craze...) Of the band members, only Jessie really emerges as a character, and he’s likable enough, with his most redeeming quality being his obviously sincere belief in both his own talent and that of his band mates. The conflict set up with the puritanical townsfolk (effectively the same as Chopper Chicks, not that it’s a novelty) is handled effectively enough to root for the band, if only because their act is about as threatening as a pet rock. It’s all the more amusing to see the undead rockers glide through the streets, with more choreographed finesse than we have seen from them on stage. Unfortunately, things take a very bad turn with the relationship between Jessie and Cassie, which in itself could be accepted as Platonic or nearly so, but keeps getting cringier and cringier as his ballade to her is repeated.

On the other side is what always really gets talked about, the zombies and the totally surreal visuals. It is here that the movie has the strongest similarities to Chopper Chicks, and most clearly shows how much that film improved on the premise. What should be most telling here is that, on viewing the film with its history in mind, I had no trouble making several guesses about which scenes were originally in American Drive-In. The slippery slope actually starts with a random murder in the opening scene, by a blonde siren who will account for fewer casualties after she comes back from the dead. Once the Nazis start reanimating, we get a range of strange sight gags and sequences, egregiously a dwarf who literally eats himself. The most unfortunate part is that when played straight, these are grim ghouls with a range of responses, including a bizarre posited fear of the brains of the living that actually allows the townspeople to push them back temporarily. When the story tries to get laughs out of them, things usually go downhill. In many ways, the strangest and most entertaining moments are from the living, notably a talent scout who praises the band after liberal self-medication and a young woman who continues to converse with her boyfriend’s severed head. The most truly surreal character is that of the siren, who spends much of the time dancing in place while mayhem unfolds around her.

For the “one scene”, this is the part where I came closest to giving up entirely. Nonetheless, there was an early sequence that caught my attention, in no small part because it actually advances what plot there is in this movie. While the townspeople are complaining and scheming, we find Jessie alone, grooving with his guitar. All the more surprisingly, he actually sounds pretty good, about right for the edgy side of late ‘60s-early ‘70s rock. While he strums, a tarantula comes along, seemingly drawn by the beat. When it starts to climb on Jessie’s hand, he promptly knocks it aside and squashes it, then resumes playing. Somehow, the music not only reanimates the spider but makes it whole enough to keep coming. This time, Jessie smashes it more gruesomely than before, with no immediate reaction. Before he starts strumming, however, he puts a glass over the creature. As the riffs keep coming, the spider’s legs again begin to move, in a rhythm that could be in time with the elemental chords. It all makes next to no sense, but for this brief moment and a few more like it, the movie works on its own anarchic terms.

In closing, I will not mince words: I consider this absolutely the worst movie I have reviewed for this feature, though I still have one or two under consideration that could give it a run for its money. In fact, the difference in quality compared to other movies is great enough that I considered giving it the “unrated” rating, previously given to Cemetery Man and Dead Alive. What stopped me is that there is little if anything here that can be considered willfully extreme or controversial, as those movies clearly were. That is truly the problem here. Despite some trappings of social commentary, this is a movie that does not offend (at least on purpose) simply because it has no point to make. Even if it is allowed to be no worse as a movie than other films covered here, which I can grant for Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and maybe Video Dead, it would still fall far behind them in effectiveness. If anything, it is the borderline-pretentious self-awareness of the former film that could have pulled this one through. Instead, it lets its potential slip away in a final act that only ramps up the random, right where Chopper Chicks pulls through. As usual, there are still far worse zombie movies out there that were never on my radar for inclusion here, but one would be hard pressed to find one that’s more disappointing.