HRZ is another one of those classic Victor Video finds (see my review for God Told Me To for more on that... and because NOBODY is reading that review and if you really loved me you'd read it... unless of course you like fleshing eating scarab beetles in your bed while you sleep, in which case just continue NOT reading it...). I'd like to thank Jordan at the Bad Movie Vault for giving me a reason to finally re-review this movie, while letting me relive my personal golden age of obscure VHS rental finds. Those were the days. I had memberships to 13 different stores and each had their own stockpile of b-horror that nobody else in the area cared about. That was fine by me though, cuz it forced all of the stores to offer “5 movies for 5 nights for 5 dollars” on the non-new release stuff, allowing me to build up a catalog of homemade video bootlegs that to this day I've barely managed to put a ding into. I used to be pretty good at keeping up with myself, but those were the days when the Evil Dead Bride and myself lived 200 miles apart and the only things I had to fill my days while not talking to her were working second shift at IBM and a small but loyal group of friends who encouraged me to dig out said movies so they could bear witness to a showcase of the bizarre like they'd never seen. It's amazing how many people think Cannibal Holocaust actually happened, especially since most of the people I showed it to were the same ones I'd picked apart The Blair Witch Project for just weeks prior...

So, yeah, Hard Rock Zombies. Remember the glorious '80s when heavy metal music was being blamed for teenage suicides? Before the world paid some fucking attention and realized it was depression and not Judas Priest or Ozzy Osbourne painting impressionable teen gray matter over the bedroom walls of America? Especially hilarious was the ignorance of the average God fearing American parent who thought that men in leather with bad ass painted album covers that made Dungeons & Dragons look cool were not only seducing their poor innocent babies into lives of self-abuse and devil worship, but that there was actual witchcraft at work in those vinyl grooves. Yes, just like Parker Brothers provides kids with a gateway to Hell for $19.99, so has Ronnie James Dio and Eagle Records the power to teach fans the 5 easy steps to summoning Satan... provided they're intuitive (i.e. shroomed out of their heads) enough to spin his tracks backwards. We saw it in The Gate, we saw it in Trick or Treat, and now it's time to address it as the joke it really is by seeing it in Hard Rock Zombies: a movie so bad that it was banned in Iceland! Given that the quality has in no way improved over the last 20 years, you'll still be violently throttled by big Nordic security guys with croquet mallets at the airport if you try smuggling a copy into the country... that, or Björk will just beat you over the head with a swan.

In one of the more oddball openings in the annals of bad movie history, a trashy blond hitchhiker in an outfit that looks like it was made of torn up soiled bed sheets, flags down a pair of unattractive guys (whose '80s-ness just seeps from their unwashed pores) in a hot rod on a middle-of-nowhere road. She leads the pair to a secluded pond and entices them to go skinny dipping with her while, unknown to the men, a trio of well-dressed but social diseased folk watch nearby, snapping pictures and generally prancing around like 5-year olds on Ecstasy. The guy with the camera looks like Norman Bates with his freak flag at full mast and the other two are midgets: one looks like a cancer-ridden troll and the other is a young Phil Fondacaro (pint-sized hero to the Tomb!) wearing an eye patch. Rubbing the burning sensation from my eyes after one of the hot rodding doofi (plural for doofus) bears his pale man ass at us, I regain my vision in time to watch as the hitchhiker holds him underwater and drowns him... somehow causing him to bleed profusely. The guy's meager flailing and half-hearted attempts at NOT DYING go unnoticed by his buddy, who was apparently otherwise occupied 15ft away, likely wrestling with the internal dilemma of whether it would be crossing the gay borders to go skinny dipping with a male friend, even though there's also a woman involved. Continuing to NOT LOOK at what's going on, he finally enters the pond (with his back to everything that's happening), only to be accosted by the hitchhiker as well, putting up just as little resistance to his watery grave as the other guy did, but somehow spewing forth no less blood as he does so. The bodies are dragged ashore and wrapped in plastic garbage bags while the femme fatale pulls out a switchblade and cuts off one of the bodies' hands with one clean slice... and surprisingly no bloodshed... because drowning not only causes the human body to bleed out excessively, but to bleed out entirely... As she cradles her newfound trophy to her face, she sings a short (and ear stabbingly off-key) rendition of “I wanna hold your hand”. And I'll bet you that entire 3 minute opening was written just so she could make that horrible musical pun too.

The rest of my review won't be nearly as detailed a recap as that last paragraph, I just wanted to go all-out with the play-by-play so you could get the inkling of just how deep a dive this movie becomes in terms of absolute insanity. Prepare for nothing to make sense as reality gets rabbit punched in the kidneys and spends the next 90 minutes pissing blood to the tune of '80s hair metal and the sound of jaws dropping into to the floor in befuddled disbelief and incomprehension. If this shit came with 3-D glasses, I'd never leave my living room.

Our next scene introduces us to the real stars of the movie: a nameless hair metal group whom I'll refer to as the A-Holes to help differentiate them from any other nameless hair metal bands that might come up in the course of this review. The A-Holes sound like a Canadian KISS cover band. They're led by sensitive guitarist Jessie, who wields a camouflage bass on stage and belts out such future platinum hits as “Shake It Up Baby” in front of an electrified audience of 10 or 15 extras in a bar whose floor space is mostly taken up by the band's setup. Speaking of the band's setup, most bands put up some crazy-ass backdrop for their performances, with Rob Zombie's probably being some of the best. What do the A-Holes have? A huge painted stand-up of the band with the faces removed like a Coney Island novelty photo cut-out... if the band's already on stage, why would they need a novelty photo cut-out of themselves!? There's no time to ponder that mystery of life though, because we're too busy turning our heads away in shock and horror as, after the show, we have to watch the band backstage talking to their manager while Jessie and the boys frolic around each other in their shorts. And I don't mean boxer shorts either, I'm talking tighty-whiteys and banana hammocks all around... That's okay though, I had blueberry pancakes for breakfast this morning, so I don't mind tasting 'em twice! Between the pale man ass from earlier and the assortment of barely contained man-sausages here, at least if I ever become bulimic I'll have a stomach emptying alternative to fingering my esophagus.

While his band mates are busy signing their fans' boobs and getting their knobs gobbled by brain dead jail bait cooze, the “I'm in it for my love of the music” Jessie takes a walk and meets the awkward young lady Cassie... who stole her eyebrows from Anthony Quinn. Cassie's from the small hick town of Grand Guignol (har har) and she warns Jessie that the close-minded Bible fuckers in her neighborhood don't want anything to do with the A-Holes' upcoming concert and their disgusting, popular, 1980s cock rock. Determined to go on to GG and give the town the ol' Footloose treatment, the guys stop on the way to pick up a familiar looking piece of highway skank. Trashy McNoPanties invites the band to stay at her family's mansion while they're in town, and what a family they are!... in that Texas Chainsaw Massacre way. The bitchhiker's weirdo brother/husband with the camera is there, of course, along with their apparent children Phil Fondacaro (wearing an eye patch remember) and that cancerous troll whose eyes never blink. There's also a skinhead with a fetish for sharp things; the gang's switchblade swinging, wheelchair rocking, werewolf mother (does a werewolf really need a pair of switchblades?!); and lest we forget the family's patriarch: Hitler. Yep, the Hitler. I told you this movie would blister your brain... in a good way... kinda.

When they engage in some wacky musical montage hi-jinks through town (including dancing around cars, starting up homo-erotic conga lines, and skateboarding tomfoolery) in an effort to promote the show, the guys get locked up by the local pig patrol for disturbing the peace... or owning a van... or having long hair... or something. After a brief stay in “jail” (it's a shack with bars on the window, hay covering the floor, and stacks of wooden crates stored inside...) and some really disturbing flirtation sequences between Jessie and Cassie (who can't be older than 14), the band's bailed out by their bimbo hostess and return to the mansion to rehearse for the next night's big concert. It turns out the A-Holes would've been better off serving out their original jail sentence though, when they're killed off one-by-one in a mangled menagerie of scenes that includes not only their murders by the incestuous mutant Nazi fiends, but images of the townsfolk destroying everything to do with rock 'n' roll, and snippets of the blond bimbo doing some kind of weird '80s interpretative flashdance?! Was this from her audition tape to be a back up dancer for Paula Abdul!? Despite being killed half way through the movie though, you can't count out Jessie and the A-Holes yet, because before being weed-whackered to death by the grinning skinhead Jessie gives Cassie a very magical demo tape of him speaking Latin gibberish. When she plays the tape at their grave site (where they weren't even buried six inches under, let alone six feet), it resurrects the A-Holes!... who it looks like were buried in outfits bought from Skid Row's yard sale... Fortunately they're incapable of speech and can only walk around in a style that can be described as Romero zombies doing the Robot. This saving grace is made moot when it turns out they can still play their instruments and sing. And I had such hope for their violent deaths...

Fresh from their top-soil tombs, the guys do their gay robot strut/march back to the Nazi mutants' mansion where they take their revenge and kill every last goose-stepping one of them. What they don't know is that when a ghoul kills someone, that someone also becomes a ghoul, so while the Hard Rock Zombies are heading out to perform their original concert as planned (living or undead), the ignorant hillbilly citizens find themselves under siege by the hungry incisors of the Third Reich of the Living Dead. Before you can say “life impaired glam rock pussy band”, the HRZ perform Jessie's “ode to statutory rape” love song in front of Cassie and a record exec in a glorified high school auditorium, complete with interlaced fantasy sequences of Jess and Cass dressed in wedding decor and making out. This doesn't just make my skin crawl because she's barely old enough to bleed, but because Cass also looks like a Bulgarian drag queen. Then again, now that he's not technically alive, does that mean Jessie can't be brought up on charges for having sex with underage Bulgarian drag queens? Oh wait, Cassie would probably have to go to prison for necrophilia, so either way this relationship is doomed.

Convinced that the only way to get rid of all the ghouls is to give them a virgin to gangbang so they'll be sexually satisfied enough to go back to sleep for 100 years afterwards (what the fuck!?), the remaining civilians kidnap Cassie to use as zombie (jail) bait. Jessie and the band ignore the big deal record exec's contract offer (then why the fuck did they come back from the dead to perform the concert if they don't want the recording contract?!) and return to their shallow 3-inch graves, only to be called back a second time by their manager to save Cassie and kill off all of the other zombies. The only things the undead like more than teenage virgin rape is a free concert, so the Hard Rock Zombies lure the deadies into a cave (which looks suspiciously like someone's basement...) outside of town with one last performance, then poison them with Zombie Hitler's stockpile of World War II mustard gas... that shit has a longer shelf life than Twinkies™!

Hard Rock Zombies was originally created as a 20 minute short for a horror comedy anthology, so when you're wondering why it feels like you're watching 20 minutes of story with an hour of crazy filler shit tacked in, then the connection to the Bad Movie Force is strong in you my young Padawan. Way too much of that time is stuffed to the brim with lame concert performances and more pseudo music video sequences than there are in a 90 minute block of “We Are the '80s” on VH1Classic. As if that wasn't bad enough, we have to sit through the same three or four songs over and over again. Even though so much of the flick hurts to watch, HRZ works on that Spookies level, where there's just a menagerie of freakish characters and scenes for the sake of there being freakish characters and scenes. Everything ends up being thrown at you in the hopes that something will stick and entertain you long enough that you'll watch it through to the end credits. If you don't know how to bake a pie, just throw in anything and everything in your cupboards that sounds good and hope some kind of chemical chain reaction doesn't happen when you throw it in the oven. This pie's got a LOT of tasty nuggets to it. Zombie Nazi Phil Fondacaro (with an eye patch) chasing after a nubile young woman as fast as his little undead legs will take him while a wacky synthesizer tune plays, only to settle for eating a live cow later. The rubber faced troll eating his own zombie self (continuing to do so even after he's devoured anything that might be considered part of his digestive tract) for no apparent reason except the theory that his boils and warts might be filled with Ranch dressing. Frightened townsfolk trying to ward off their ghoulish neighbors using paintings of celebrities' heads for reasons that still don't make sense even if you're sober enough to pay attention to whatever it is they're saying. And this is all just the tip of the funky smellin' finger.

Normally with a movie like this you're either going to embrace the madness like it was your pet rabbit George or you'll want to mercifully stomp it to death like a bird who broke its neck while dive-bombing your window. In simpler terms, Hard Rock Zombies is really a "love it or hate it" flick. At one time I thought it was a definite "love it" movie, but once you've seen all the insanity it has to offer, the shock value wears off and every viewing after the first shows off all of its prom night pimples. I'm not even complaining about Jessie's pedophilia or Hitler's nonagenarian nookie or any of the other bizzaro moments that make the movie memorable, but the basic bas movie staples like shitty acting, terrible music, uneven special effects (some good, some little more than watered down Heinz™ on someone's neck), and a general lack of lighting combined with lazy camera work. This kind of half-hearted "production" just pains me to watch, especially when it happens to a movie that otherwise blows out your frontal lobe with its Margot Kidder levels of craziness. It's a clusterfuck to be sure, but it's just odd enough a clusterfuck that it needs to sat through at least once so you've got something interesting to tell your grandkids one day. Trust me though, after that first viewing, just give it to a friend and never watch it again. Don't sully the memories.