Welcome back to my Dark Corner of this Sick World
'Can I give you a hand?'
Hard Rock Zombies opens as it means to go on...
Bafflingly.
I should warn you in advance, this is a comedy horror rock musical,
a sub-genre which has not produced a whole lot of classics
'Rock and Roll'
But wilfully bizarre can be entertaining so let's give it chance.
'Listen man, we are musicians not day camp counsellors'
A hard rock band
SINGING 'Shake shake - shake it oh baby!'
who for some reason have a keyboardist from Kraftwerk
and which the writers were too lazy to even name, have an audition for an agent,
in the small town of Grand Guignol
'Is this town kinda weird or something?'
'Nothing weird here'
Now that's a lie, but the weirdness starts before they even arrive
'They said in the middle ages they used this music to raise the dead.'
A rock band whose music can raise the dead, that would be worth seeing
but the townsfolk don't take a shine to them
'No rock and roll. No concert tomorrow night'
This seems to be the usual objection to the music of Satan
'My readers digest says that these songs have hidden messages'
but it's worth noting that they do also cause a traffic jam
The band stay with a pair of aging sex fiends
'You're 95 years old and you can still do it.'
and their midget grandchildren
'Can't we watch, please?'
And before they even get to the concert they are picked off by electrocution...
Grandma werewolf
a maniac with a strimmer
and a girl who likes to re-enact Hitchcock, shot for shot, in the shower
'How about Psycho!'
Presumably this is where Gus Van Sant got the idea
None are spared
'The whole band is dead sir'
and to make matters worse
'40 years I've been waiting and you are telling calm!'
'For long enough have been hiding behind a mask!'
'Oh my God!'
Bet you didn't see that coming '
'No more Mr Nice Guy'
But the lead singer's young groupie now plays the resurrection music
And the zombie marching band...
takes its bloody vengeance
To summarise: a rock band who can raise the dead visit that town from Footloose
to find that Hitler now lives there and fall prey to his entourage of
midgets, werewolves a maniac with a strimmer and a sexy psychopath.
'I wanna hold you hand.'
They're then resurrected and take undead revenge on their killers
That takes us to the halfway point.
After that, I'm afraid it gets weird
Actually it doesn't get weirder - it's hard to see how it could - it gets less coherent
'This is a delicate topic so brace up'
The first half is total crap but it makes sense in its own context;
the band come here, are murdered, are resurrected and take revenge.
That's a complete story, but there's still 45 minutes to go
'You are all doomed'
So all the bad guys now get back up again
and attack the town
while the zombie band go through with their audition
'This is the most incredible act I've ever seen'
We must be watching different bands
'Oh, bullshit young stupid'
I think it's important the audition's there, that feels like something that needed to be tied up,
but everything else in the second half is superfluous
'Ghouls hate heads the way Satan hates the church - you see ghouls are the antithesis of intelligence'
when your characters are talking this level of crap then you've got to be pretty desperate to fill 90 minutes
and it can only leads to some very odd places
but there's a larger problem -
Hitler and friends come back to life because they are already undead ghouls
'But how did they become ghouls?'
'How is very simple, they just...'
Someone thought that was funny
'You think that I am stupid?'
You can't deliberately make a film that's so bad it's good
'Ahoooo, Lord have mercy!'
It's just bad
Everything else wrong with this film... and they don't even spell the director's name write in the credits.
you could put to one side and just wonder at the sheer weirdness
'Strange town. Strange little girls'
But it's attempts to be funny are unforgivable
'Oh my God! Are you okay?'
Thanks for watching real hard corners subscribe simple question this time round
Have you ever seen a film weirder than this one let us know your bizarre films in the comments below
'Sloppy exit, but we'll work with alright.'