In order to understand how Hard Rock Zombies exists, it helps to know about director Krishna Shah’s American Drive-In, a screwball comedy along the lines of Lloyd Kaufman’s Squeeze Play and Stuck On You. Shot on location at an actual drive-in, the movie eschewed a traditional plot for a string of unconnected comedy scenes. It contained the kind of “boys will be boys” humor in which the majority of the jokes were essentially “Look at how fat/gay/horny this character is!”
Rather than license an existing film, Shah set out to shoot key scenes of a fake movie that American Drive-In’s characters could watch whenever he needed a cutaway of the screen. As with most movies-within-a-movie, Shah’s would be a heightened parody, jampacked with a laundry list of horror tropes. Zombies? You got it. Werewolves? Why the hell not. Incredibly shitty rock music? We gotchu, fam. Then someone on the production had a brilliant idea: Why not make the movie-within-a-movie a feature length film? And so Hard Rock Zombies was born, somehow beating its parent film to release.
And if you thought my description of American Drive-In indicated questionable content, you’ve seen nothing yet. The heroes of Hard Rock Zombies are a sleazy rock band who make numerous comments about their underage roadies. One of their songs, written about a ~13 year old who the hero meets on the road, is as follows: “I’m so in love, but you’re so young. When you touch my hand, does that mean we’re in love?” I point this out not because it contains such content, but because the film seemingly endorses it. These are the heroes of the film, after all, and while I’m no stranger to movies featuring challenging characters for a good reason, this one plays out like an Anthony Kiedis documentary as directed by Brett Ratner.
There are admirable qualities to be found, too, provided you like DIY movies such as Video Violence and Rock N’ Roll Nightmare. The rock band is invited to stay at a secluded mansion where they are murdered by a family of ghouls and later resurrected through the power of rock. What’s most interesting about the film is it doesn’t seem to have a script at all. It appears they’re just dragging a camera crew out and winging it. No, the end result is nowhere near as good as This Is Spinal Tap, but it keeps the kill-to-fluff ratio surprisingly balanced. Even the fluff is entertaining in a gloriously stupid way. At one point the head patriarch of the family randomly removes a mask, revealing that he has been Adolf Hitler in disguise all along. Frankly, if you’re going to put Hitler in your movie, you should give him a much nastier death than the one seen here.
The hard rock zombies exact their revenge and return to LA where they audition for a hot shot record producer. Unfortunately, they’ve left a trail of non-rock zombies in their wake, which are now wreaking havoc on a small town of morons. At one point the morons hypothesize that, because zombies are the antithesis of intellectualism, zombies must be scared of human heads the way vampires fear crucifixes. So a group of survivors take to the streets, hiding behind giant faces of Elvis, John Lennon, and Marylin Monroe, only to get themselves predictably killed. This gag might have worked if the film didn’t have such terrible comedic timing. Much like American Drive-In, the whole thing devolves into one unconnected scene after another.
Like the extended cut of Underworld, which I featured last Saturday, the relatively new Blu-Ray edition of this film restores some of its censored content in the form of VHS quality footage. Unlike Underworld, the film quality is so janky to begin with, the VHS footage doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. In fact, I suspect many viewers may not even notice it. There is so little of this restored content, however, that the runtime of both versions clocks in at at 97 minutes. Even so, the vast majority of the gore is contained in that scant footage.
Knowing what I know now, I would probably skip it if I were you… but I’m not you. Because I’m me, I’d watch it anyway. Not great. Barely good.
