Hard Rock Zombies

1985 "They came from the grave to Rock n' Rave and misbehave."
4.5| 1h38m| R| en| More Info
Released: 01 September 1985 Released
Producted By: Cannon Group
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

A hard rock band travels to the tiny and remote town of Grand Guignol to perform. Peopled by hicks, rubes, werewolves, murderous dwarves, sex perverts, and Hitler, the town is a strange place but that doesn't stop the band's lead singer from falling in love with a local girl named Cassie. After Nazi sex perverts kill the band to satisfy their lusts, Cassie calls the rockers back from the grave to save her, the town, and maybe the world.

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Reviews

lost-in-limbo As I sat down to watch "Hardrock Zombies", I didn't know what to expect. By its title I was assuming it was a Troma production… and it's not, but it wouldn't be out of place either. Really I don't know what I just watched. Crazy, stupid. Indeed. Amusing at times, but boy what the hell was going on? This cruddy low-cost, shot-on-video production is one noisy, twisted ("You can watch, but don't touch.") and strange horror / comedy that throws caution to wind, as if it was made on the spot adding details as they went along. Everything is chucked in from rock music, T&A, a nutty backwoods family (consisting of a werewolf, midgets, and psychotic nymph), unwelcoming hillbillies, zombies, Nazis and Adolf Hitler(!). It's terrible, but it has that feeling like it was aiming for that. By the end of it, what it feels like is one very long, spontaneously tripped-out music video clip with wild camera-work. Break out the jamming (you know rock ballads) and the pointless posing --- with many disjointed images edited in (a lady dancing around), but don't forget the story involving an up and coming rock band stopping by in a backwoods town to play and staying at the home of the beautifully strange girl they picked up. So you might be asking how do zombies come to be, well wait around for the halfway mark. This when the zombies show up (it's not quite as random as many of the ideas popping up) and from then it gets even sillier ("ghouls don't like heads"). You don't know how, but it just does. The production has tacky make-up on show, wooden performances, is shoddily written and is completely direction-less with its meandering pace."Hardrock Zombies" is inane rubbish, which you might find yourself digging through.
vaultonburg If Orson Welles only had the talent he would have made Hard Rock Zombies, but he didn't. So these guys did. "Ghouls hate heads..." The plot of this movie is incomprehensible. The execution of the script is amateurish. It's quite possibly the stupidest movie of all time. And if you haven't seen it you're not alive. Get yourself some Milk Duds, some Schlitz, and HRZ, Troll 2, The Pit and have a grooviest bad movies of all time-athon. Umm, the music sounds OK, too, when you're really drunk. It's really kind of hard to say ten lines about Hard Rock Zombies. I just wanted to say it rocked I didn't want to be here all night trying to think of things to say about it.
Spent Bullets Ah, eighties music. When it was good, it was good; and when it was forgettable, it lives on only in artifacts such as this movie. Rock and roll zombies, midget Nazi rednecks, a grandma who turns into a werewolf, a nearly mute young girl with Groucho Marx's eyebrows, and Adolph Hitler himself—how can you go wrong with a lineup like that? Very easily! All in all, a bland movie. You can obviously see how the filmmakers were trying to keep themselves interested, with limited results: The Hitler scene (I honestly thought the movie would get better after that); Hitchhiker Girl's repeated interpretive dance sequences; even the deformed dwarf slowly eating his entire body (in the last scene, he's nothing but a head -- and then he sucks his face into his mouth and chews, leaving only a skull). Despite all that, you could almost hear the director yawning. Or maybe that was me.
DevilPaul 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.