Hard Rock Zombies

Hard Rock Zombies (1985)

Dir Krishna Shah

Written by David Allan Ball, Krishna Shah

Starring E. J. Curse, Sam Mann, Jennifer Coe, Lisa Toothman, Phil Fondacaro

So, in this one, there’s an unnamed everyband of groupie-banging outlaw “Hard Rock” musicians, and they go to the tiny town of Grand Guignol, Canada, because it is the only place where a big studio mogul will come to hear them play and subsequently hand over wheelbarrows full of money, hot tubs full of groupies, and learjets full of lawyers to restore the correct balance of the universe. Problem is, they didn’t really think through this plan very well because despite having a state-of-the-art 5,000-seater rock venue, the townsfolks of Grand Guignol oppose rock and roll and have recently passed an ordinance banning it, resulting in a tense confrontation with the local rednecks and cops (unlike BLACK ROSES, this time there's no evidence that the townsfolk were right to do it, this "hard rock" band is about as benign as you can get). 

You’d think that would be the worst news, but wouldn’t you know it, a nubile hard rock blonde (Lisa Toothman, WITCHCRAFT III: KISS OF DEATH) has been luring men to skinnydip with her in a fetid pond outside Norman Bates’ house in a totally not at all suspicious manner, but I'll be damned if the minute they’re nude some maniac doesn't chop them up while two mutant dwarfs watch and a creep in a white suit takes photos from the bushes. So despite the pleas from a virginal groupie named Cassandra (Jennifer Coe, “teenage girl” in one episode of TV’s Falcon Crest, nothing else) when our intrepid heroes see a hot blonde hitchhiker, they can’t resist spending the night at her gothic palatial manor and meeting her parents (or roommates? it’s a little unclear) who turn out to be quite a colorful lot that give the TEXAS CHAINSAW family a run for its money in the eccentric relatives department. Blondie is the only one who’s not a monster, werewolf, mutant, peeping tom, or (widely known spoiler) elderly pervert Hitler,* so it’s actually kind of sweet that she’s not embarrassed by her wacky relatives and happily introduces everyone she meets to the whole fam-dambly. But as often happens in this sort of situation, cultures collide and the band ends up getting killed, only to be resurrected by a taped magical incantation the bass player had been messing around with. You’d think this would result in some revenge (and it briefly does), but actually the band returns with only one thing on its zombie mind, which is to play the hardest god damn rock show ever experienced by a single old man sitting alone in the audience.

Now I’ve seen plenty of heroically misguided movies, but come on, there’s no way that plot was written with the sincere belief that this would be good. This is nakedly a deliberate attempt to produce a wacky cult movie, and they pull out all the stops in terms of content and quality to produce something campy and ridiculous. This is a risky strategy generally; there’s no shortage of hilariously terrible movies which were earnestly trying to be good, so an equally low-rent movie which is actively trying to be dumb feels a little dishonest and its absurdity doesn’t carry as much goodwill. I think ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW is probably the only example of this impulse which mostly works, and even that is carried mostly on the shoulders of some pretty good songs, which HARD ROCK ZOMBIES definitively lacks. But you gotta at least respect the amount of overkill that went into making this one offbeat. Any one of the fifty or so ridiculous gimmicks here would be more than enough to hang an entire movie on, but HARD ROCK ZOMBIES just keeps tossing more on the pile. What it lacks in earnestness it makes up for in eagerness, which is not quite as rewarding but still enough to get by.

The movie has a pretty bizarre structure, wherein our lovable band of “hard rock” troubadours are introduced as the main characters, but get offed by the 1/ 3 point, get their revenge at the halfway mark (both in the form of musical montages) and then things get a little directionless as the movie casts about for any remaining characters to guide us to the finale. The resurrected zombies don’t have much personality other than their shuffling moaning and supposed hard rocking, so the movie somewhat halfheartedly tries to pretend anyone might care about their dorky manager and the ignorant townsfolk, which needless to say we do not. It tries to compensate with some goofy, tangential vignettes --constant cutaways to a rubber dwarf who eats himself, an unnecessarily protracted sequence where townsfolk try to avoid rampaging zombies by making giant cardboard heads for themselves-- but even so, there’s still some dead space to fill with random nothing (there’s a lot of unrelated footage of a blonde chick Whitesnake-dancing peppered in-between minor events).

That might be because HARD ROCK ZOMBIES did not actually begin life as a real movie, even one with aspirations as low as we see here. It was supposed to be a movie-within-a-movie in director Krishna Shah’s other 1985 movie AMERICAN DRIVE-IN (which shares a good portion of this cast). Shah, an Indian-born entrepreneurial jack-of-all-trades (everything from producing Broadway shows to being CEO of Double Helix Films) apparently decided somewhere along the way to just invest the minimal amount of money necessary to expand the 20-minute joke film to a full-length extravaganza, thereby essentially producing two feature films for the price of one. This crafty business move resulted in a side project which is now certainly the more beloved of the two movies, if any film which doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page can be realistically described as beloved (Update: Good news, looks like as of 2018, HARD ROCK ZOMBIES has finally made the big times!). Of course, when you stretch out a in-movie joke to a full 98 minutes, the material can get a little thin (see: GRINDHOUSE and all its ancillary products except the brilliant HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN), resulting in the scattershot sketch-comedy approach which lards up the second half of this Frankenstein's movie just when it ought to be gaining momentum. But it hustles pretty hard all the way through; it may be somewhat haphazardly assembled, but at least it’s seldom uneventful.

Anyway, if you would be interested in seeing a campy zombie pastiche where they reverse-Auschwitz zombie Hitler as a hilarious joke, this one will probably provide the experience you've been craving. It’s maybe not quite as hilarious or subversive as it wants to be --it’s probably funnier to describe than it is to actually watch-- but it does have some legitimate chuckles in there, more than enough to nestle it comfortably in the company of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, RETURN OF CAPTAIN INVINCIBLE, NOT OF THIS EARTH (1988) or something. You know, movies which are not exactly good, or even successful on their own terms, but still have a certain scrappy personality which makes them at least intermittently watchable. If it falls short of the not-especially-lofty standards of ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, however, it does so wholly as a result of its songs. It’s a musical through and through (in fact, most of the major events in the film are communicated through the form of montage music videos) but Jesus, this barely even qualifies as rock, let alone hard rock. There’s a vaguely metal final number which at least hangs its aspirations on a crunchy rock riff, but mostly the keyboards have an iron grip on these tracks which place them definitively in the wuss-rock category. These guys may need to call themselves hard rock zombies to register as rebellious enough for naive teenagers in tiny midwestern towns to want to bang, but I know a song that could feasibly be covered by Air Supply when I hear it. They got a few energetic rockabilly numbers, but Hard Rock? You want to look into Slash’s sunglasses and tell him you’re in the same subgenre as him? Slash isn’t going to accept that shit, and you know it. Plus, consider the following:

That is not acceptable behavior even in a montage context. Your hard rock card has been revoked.

Anyway, aside from the disspiriting lack of hard rock, this one’s got everything. Zombies. Mullets. Whitesnake dancing. Cannibalistic muppets. A dwarf with an eyepatch.** Giant cardboard heads of famous celebrities. Sex-pervert Hitler. Zombie Hitler. Nudity. A goofy parody of PSYCHO. Werewolf Eva Braun. Decapitating. Zany Antics. A town hall meeting. And many, many musical montages. This would probably have been better if it had slightly more aspiration to be a real movie, but at least you can’t accuse it of lack of effort. It’s definitely aiming to please, it just might be trying a little too hard.

*By the way, actor Jack Bliesener has only two credited roles: Hitler, and “the President of the United States” (in the Greeksploitation crime thriller ZEUS THE CRIME KILLER). Talk about range!

**Give credit to by far the most distinguished member of the cast, dwarf actor Phil Fondacaro, who was an Ewok, a Garbage Pail Kid, a PHANTASM dwarf, a Willow, “Chihuahua” in LAND OF THE DEAD, dwarf Dracula in THE CREEPS, and the troll from TROLL. This guy’s a fuckin’ national treasure. His IMDB entry notes that he is the shortest Dracula ever on film, a full three feet short of Christopher Lee (who it claims is the tallest Dracula). Plus, he and I share a birthday. I’m now a fan for life.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: They came back from the grave to rock and rave and misbehave! and Their Farewell Concert is to Die For! AND, Your Can't Keep a Good Band Down! They're not a good band so I don't know what that last one means, but still, all quality efforts.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Nope, sorry to disappoint.
• SEQUEL: None, amazingly
• REMAKE: None, amazingly
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: USA
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Ha
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Phil Fondacaro
• BOOBIES: Yes
• MULLETS: Oh God, yes
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: The drummer is murdered while having consensual shower kissing, probably doesn't count. Then, the townsfolk want to fix everything by forcing our virginal groupie hero to have sex with all the zombies. Fortunately that doesn't come to pass.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Head ripped off (by zombie Hitler!) hand cut off, revived.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: Yeah, some sort of weird muppet or something, also werewolf.
• THE UNDEAD: Zombies! (both hard rock and generic varieties)
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Yeah, the murderous Hitler family.
• EVIL CULT: No, although a chant from the middle ages revives the zombies.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Humans into Zombies, Eva Braun into Werewolf.
• VOYEURISM: Yes, pervy camera guy photographs the murders from the bushes or through a window.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: So high it doesn't even have its own wikipedia page.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: If you're going to bill yourself as "hard rock" you better be damn sure I'll consider your shit hard. Otherwise, no amount of zombie Hitlers and flesh-eating muppets is ever going to be enough to entirely forgive you.
• TITLE ACCURACY: In the words of Dan P, "more like Wuss Rock Ghouls."
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Murders in the Rue Morgue

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

Starring Jason Robards, Herbert Lom, Michael Dunn, Christine Kaufman

People have been adapting Poe stories since the very beginning of cinema, and it’s easy to understand why: Poe stories are filled with irresistible imagery, articulated by a true master storyteller with a uniquely nightmarish imagination (which also incidentally, tended to imagine impressive set pieces which can be created on a budget. It’s not like we’re talking H.P. Lovecraft giant monsters and universes of unimaginable horror). According to the Olde Farmer’s Wikipedia, the earliest known Poe film was made in 1909, and they’ve been cranking ‘em out ever since then, perhaps reaching a high water mark with the many Corman-produced adaptations in the 50s and 60s.

Unfortunately, despite a full century of efforts, I don’t think there’s a single film out there which really quite qualifies as a direct adaptation. The reason Poe was such an indelible master of horror fiction was that his voice was so unique, and his command of language was so stunning. Visualizing Poe’s mind tends to lead to something less than the poetry of his words, and has resulted in some morose but uninspired films which pick pieces of his work but fail to capture the essential character of Poe’s prose. That, and a lot of his stories are not particularly eventful. Take the words out of THE RAVEN and you’re left with a guy sitting in a room where a bird flies through the window. The greatness is in Poe’s bruising psychological violence and his profound ability to evoke dread comes through his peerless command of his medium of the written word. There’s plenty of room for someone with an equal mastery of cinema to capture that same haunting poetry – but it would take someone with a mastery of cinema equal to Poe’s mastery of the written word.

Which is a roundabout way of saying Gordon Hessler ain’t that guy. No offense to him intended; I don’t know who would be. David Lynch, maybe? Francis Coppola, in his heyday? Suggestions are welcome. We’ll see James McTiegue take a crack at it next year, but, uh, I don’t know that I’m holding my breath for him to be Poe’s artistic equal.* That being said, I’m excited as shit for that movie. Why? Simple. Just because you’re not going to create an enduring and transformative piece of art which will forever become part of the world’s great expressions of humanity doesn’t mean you’re not going to make something fun.

So I’m down with taking a visual or narrative cue from Poe and running with it, just so long as you throw me a murderous gorilla or two somewhere down the line. Bait the line with Jason Robards and Herbert Lom, and I’ll bite.

Director Hessler, in his somewhat surprisingly candid interview, is refreshingly honest about his inability to measure up to Poe, or even the long history of adaptations that came before his. In an effort to find some new ground to explore, he brings a meta approach to Poe, setting a series of unrelated killings in the context of a theater troupe which is mounting a production of Murders in the Rue Morgue. Postmodernism, of course, is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but to his credit Hessler doesn’t milk it as a gimmick; it’s more just a colorful poetic backdrop against which he sets a mostly unrelated story.

Said unrelated story finds Jason Robards (looking and dressing exactly like Vincent Price, who was originally up for this role) as the leader of an acting troupe which is shocked when one of their own is murdered during the performance. Sadistically, the murderer dons the dead actor’s costume (he’s playing the gorilla) and performs the rest of the show without anyone being the wiser! Now, many of Robard’s oldest friends an colleagues are getting murdered, but surely this doesn’t have anything to do with a former actor played by the obviously sinister Herbert Lom who went crazy and is definitely, for sure dead now, seriously, why even bother checking, has to be someone else. And it even more definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the events that occurred when Robard’s young wife (Christine Kaufman) was a child and Robards nursed an unrequited love for her mother, who by a complete coincidence was married to Lom’s character.

So it’s a pretty silly story, but there are a couple of effective bits to it. For one, Kaufman keeps blacking out and having a recurring dream about a weird abandoned house, a falling actor, and a sinister guy in a mask wielding an axe. For much of the film, the cinematography tends to be pretty standard and occasionally even a tad amateurish, but the dream sequences are sumptuously photographed and intriguingly staged. They have a dark and evocative poetry to them which actually does recall Poe’s carefully suggestive style. They hit on that subconscious level that I’m always going on about. You know how I get when I’ve been drinking. I never said I wasn’t predicable.

So the dream sequences are great, and the rest of the film has some nice atmospheric moments and a great Poe-y set in a dilapidated mansion and its accompanying crypt. But the whole thing is mostly crippled by its lack of a compelling central character arc. Robards --an actor I love—seems completely directionless here, wandering throughout the whole film without finding a clear anchor for his character. The interview with Hessler sheds some light here, as he remembers that two weeks into filming Robards was regretting not taking Lom’s role, which he correctly identified as more interesting. Unfortunately, Lom is a dead fish in his role, too – he seems barely awake in a part which calls from extreme intensity. Kaufman’s character is the only one the narrative follows all the way through, but she’s a wimpy victim throughout the whole thing, passing out at every opportunity and relying on the men around her to further any plot point. The one person here who walks away with a solid win is pioneering dwarf actor Michael Dunn, a charisma monster who somehow makes his thankless sidekick role the focal point of the whole film.

In his interview, director Hessler is admirably straightforward about the whole thing (even speculating that this film is what precipitated Robards’ career downgrade from leading man to character actor) and pretty honest about what life was like for a journeyman genre director in the 70s. He says that you had to do what you were assigned and didn’t always have a lot of control over the material, and that all you could hope to do was try to elevate whatever studio project came your way. I’d say that he can probably walk away feeling that he accomplished that, but despite a generally classy production and a few inspired sequences, the thing is an unwieldy bore.

Oddly, even though I think it's probably safe to say that Robards is a better actor than Vincent Price, getting Price in the central role here might have been enough to make it something a touch more memorable. Even on his worst day, Price has an irresistible magnetism to him which would have made the slippery character at this film’s center a more compelling force and perhaps would have given the whole enterprise a bit more focus. Price is a performer; he’s compelling to watch no matter what he’s doing. Robards is an actor, stranded without motivation and direction. Part of taking iffy material and elevating it is applying to the elements of human psychology that go beyond a single individual’s personality and motivation. Price knows how to tap into that bottomless, profound subconscious state that hits on a level which is more profound than logic, even if it is perhaps less personal. Poe did too. Maybe that combination makes more sense than most folks give it credit for.

*Edit from 2012: That turned out to be a fairly astute assumption.