Hard Rock Zombies (1984) -**

     Krishna Shah had about as twisty and turny a career as anybody in the history of show business. He got his start as a writer and director of stage plays in his native Mumbai, eventually becoming the Artistic Director of the Indian National Theatre there. His greatest successes onstage were achieved in South Africa, however, where he partnered with Cry the Beloved Country author Alan Paton and a black theater troupe called the Union of South African Artists on an anti-Apartheid play derived from three of Paton’s short stories. Sponono was a big hit in Durban, Capetown, Johannesburg, and Pietermaritzburg in 1962-1963, but it bombed on Broadway the following year. Producer Mary Frank put all the blame for that on Shah, even though she had not only distorted his and Paton’s work beyond recognition, but also went so far as to enlist the police to keep Shah away from the theater when he raised a bigger fuss over the changes than she was willing to countenance. Despite that painful setback, Shah must have recognized that America was where the big showbiz money was, because he went next to Los Angeles, to enroll in UCLA’s film school. His student short, Our Gang, was well received at the university’s “Talking Pictures” exhibition in 1966, which was also the year that Shah sold his first television script. He continued intermittently writing and directing for American TV, contributing to shows as varied as “Love, American Style,” “The Flying Nun,” and “The Six Million Dollar Man.” Then, in 1969, Shah set his sights on breaking into Hollywood.

     In theory, he picked a terrific time to do it. Stiffening competition from television, the wholesale rollup of the film industry by diversified holding companies, and a revolutionary relaxation in censorship had left the major studios floundering, and such was their desperation that they were even starting to give hippies a chance to make movies on their dime. In practice, though, Shah’s sojourn in Hollywood was Sponono on Broadway all over again. In seven years, he managed to get two whole pictures released; both of them flopped after troubled productions, and the closest Shah ever got to the majors was when the screenplay that became Rivals spent two years in Development Hell at MGM and Warner Brothers before he got the rights back and made it himself. That failure sent him back home, where the movies he made for the Indian market were, if anything, even less successful than his American pictures. Eventually, in the 1980’s, Shah landed where any filmmaker with his track record was bound to wind up sooner or later, making schlock so cheap that it almost didn’t matter whether anyone actually watched it.

     Hard Rock Zombies was Shah’s first film in that final mode. Incredibly, it was released theatrically by the Cannon Group, despite seeming to have “direct-to-video Troma Team pick-up” written all over every frame. A bizarrely incoherent horror comedy, it could easily be mistaken for a student film clumsily expanded to feature length. The only outward indication that it isn’t one of those is the carryover of the entire cast from the half that was clearly made on purpose to the half that plays like an extended series of half-assed improv skits. Just the same, it may be that a similar process was at work, for Hard Rock Zombies was not originally intended to be a movie in its own right at all. It originated as a film-within-the-film to play in the background of Shah’s hopelessly belated American Graffiti ripoff, American Drive-In, before something convinced him that it was worth making for real.

     Two guys who look like they reek of suntan lotion and Marlboro Lights are out for a drive somewhere in Southern California. Near the isolated hamlet of Grand Guignol, they spot a sexy, blonde hitchhiker (Lisa Toothman, from Eyes of the Serpent and Witchcraft III: The Kiss of Death), and immediately pull over for her. It’s easy to understand why. The hitchhiker may not be Hollywood beautiful, but she certainly is “third-hottest aerobics instructor in Bakersfield” beautiful, and that counts as hitting the big time for a couple of dudes tooling around in a fifteen-year-old muscle car. Rather than climbing into the back seat, though, the blonde invites the boys to go skinnydipping with her in the pond down the hill from where she was thumbing for rides. Talk about hitting the big time! What the muscle car dudes fail to notice, however, is that their aquatic tryst is being spied on by a well-dressed pervert with an expensive camera (Christopher Perkins) and a pair of disfigured dwarves (Gary Friedkin and Phil Fondacaro, of Ghoulies II and The Dungeonmaster, the latter hiding behind the pseudonym “H.G. Golas”). Those three look on while the blonde drowns both of her paramours in the pond, then join her in a good laugh at the victims’ expense.

     Later, in a somewhat larger town not far up the highway from Grand Guignol, hard rock hair-farmers Holy Moses are performing in a bar 80% as dumpy as the ones where my bands usually played. The group’s lineup is needlessly complicated. Jesse (Silent Rage bassist E.J. Curse, who was still calling himself Ernie Curcio at this stage of his career) is always the lead singer, while Chuck (multi-untalented easy-listening bore Mick McMains, back when he was known as Mick Manz) always plays drums, but the other two guys switch instruments constantly. If Jesse is playing bass as well as singing, then Tommy (Geno Andrews, of Americathon and Dr. Alien) plays lead guitar, but otherwise he’s the bassist instead. And Robby (Sam Mann, from Roller Blade, Roller Blade Warriors, and The Roller Blade Seven— did this guy have a niche, or what?) plays either rhythm guitar or keyboards, depending on whether the song is terrible or abominable. The crowd seems into them, though— especially the girls. That’s just what the group’s manager, Ron (Ted Wells), likes to see anyway, but it’s particularly encouraging tonight, because the next Holy Moses show is an important one. Sure, the day after tomorrow’s gig is in some itty-bitty town that no one’s ever heard of (someplace called Grand Guignol), but Ron has arranged for famous record label A&R man Don Matson (Michael David Simms, of Alien Nation and Santa’s Slay) to come out and watch the show. If all goes well, Holy Moses could have a record deal lined up in just a few days.

     What neither Ron nor the band realize is that Holy Moses is already being scrutinized and evaluated tonight. Grand Guignol is a conservative community, and three of the townsfolk— Ed (David O’Hara, from Where the Devil Dwells and Star Worms II: Attack of the Pleasure Pods), Ted (Wheeler’s Donald Moran), and Red (Jonathan King)— are at the bar on a mission to discover whether Jesse and company are the kind of influence they want their kids exposed to. Their opinion is not favorable. Meanwhile, one of Grand Guignol’s teenagers, a girl named Cassie (Zombies in the Antique Shop’s Jennifer Coe), is in the audience as well. She too wants Holy Moses to stay away from her town, but for very different reasons. Of course, her warning to Jesse when she makes her way backstage after the show might carry more weight if she would explain what those reasons are.

     The next day, Holy Moses, with Ron driving the van, head out to Grand Guignol. The gig might still be 30-some hours away, but this way they’ll have a chance to drum up some last-minute publicity in the town itself. Would you believe the first person they meet on the way in is that homicidal blonde hitchhiker? Sure you would. (Her name is Elsa, by the way, but you’ll have to wait until the closing credits to learn that.) But instead of immediately drowning Holy Moses in the nearest pond, Elsa invites them to stay through the weekend at her family’s estate on the outskirts of town, and her manifest eagerness to have the whole band run a train on her over the next two days is even more appealing than the prospect of not spending money on motel rooms. Indeed, all five guys continue to count themselves ahead of the game even after they meet Elsa’s creepy relatives. Camera Perv turns out to be Christian, whom I gather to be Elsa’s husband. The dwarves, meanwhile, are their sons; the one with the eyepatch is Mickey, while the one with the decomposing face is Buckey. Then there’s Elsa’s randy and ribald father (Emanuel Shipow, from Biohazard and The Tomb), who claims to be 95 years old, but doesn’t look a day over 70; her werewolf mother (Susan Prevatte in wolf-lady makeup, but some aging wannabe glamour girl called Nadia in human form); and a hulking, bald manservant named Olaf (Alligator’s Vincent De Stefano), who looks like he probably hasn’t axe-murdered anyone in nearly a week.

     Even so, the more immediate trouble confronting Holy Moses comes from the townspeople less likely to make the cover of Modern Mutant magazine. Ed, Ted, and Red have made their report to Sheriff Dillon (Richard Vidan, of Scarecrows and Zipperface) by the time the band arrives, and Dillon makes a point of observing their promotional antics over the course of the day. No more impressed with the outsiders than his scouts, Dillon arrests band and agent alike on horseshit charges that basically amount to being not from around here in public. Cassie shows up at the town jail bearing bail money raised from among her friends, but it’s hard to imagine $37.06 going very far toward that purpose even in the most depressed small-town economy. Still, Jesse finds the girl’s sincerity and generosity so bewitching that he falls in love with her on the spot. Naturally that will not endear him or his bandmates to Cassie’s father (David Schroeder, from Deadly Intruder and The Queen of Screams), who was already inclined to side with Ed, Ted, and Red. The band’s actual rescue comes from Eva, however, for whom five undesirables’ worth of bail is presumably chump change. The Concerned Citizens therefore change tactics. Ed— who happens to be the chairman of the town council— calls an emergency meeting for the purpose of adding a prohibition on rock and roll music to the existing municipal bylaw banning “Gypsies, circuses with lewd shows, door-to-door sales of intimate vices, and plays that depict unnatural acts or call into question American foreign policy.” Checkmate, Holy Moses!

     And in fact it’s double-checkmate, because Elsa’s family have already decided to do away with the band themselves. The revelation of their true colors entails much more than just pulling out the knives and axes, too, because it turns out that Mom and Dad have shocking secret identities! The old man is really Adolf Hitler (played by Jack Bliessener after the mask comes off), while his consort, naturally, is really Eva Braun! The musicians themselves are eliminated in a variety of individual ambushes, but the Hitlers spare Ron because the patriarch has a use for somebody with his managerial skills. He’s plotting to establish a Fourth Reich, you see, and he’ll be needing a replacement for poor Albert Speer. Ron wants nothing to do with that, but one obviously has to be very careful about saying no to Adolf Hitler.

     There’s one thing the Hitlers didn’t consider, though, when they turned on Holy Moses. Jesse had been working on a new song built around a Medieval chant that he found in some old book, which was supposed to be the centerpiece of a spell to raise the dead. Just the thing to liven up the band’s stage show, right? He recorded a very crude demo version on his boom box last night, and damned if the thing didn’t keep resurrecting the same tarantula no matter how many times Jesse swatted it into oblivion! Of all the band-members, Jesse came closest to escaping his hosts’ attack, managing to meet up with Cassie one last time before Olaf caught and killed him. He gave her the tape of the resurrection song with instructions to play it should anything happen to him. Cassie does so over the very graves of Jesse, Tommy, Robby, and Chuck, and the next thing you know, Holy Moses are back in action— albeit in distinctly unholy form.

     That’s really where Hard Rock Zombies ought to have ended, with the murdered rockers rising from the tomb and taking revenge on their killers. Also, it would have made more thematic sense for the band to have been wiped out by a lynch mob led by Ed or Sheriff Dillon, and for Elsa and her relatives to be an Addams Family-ish clan of sympathetic weirdoes, rather than a whole second set of villains with aims orthogonal to those of Grand Guingol’s hateful, suspicious town fathers. There are still 46 minutes left on the clock, though, when the last of the Hilter family falls to the wrath of the undead, so obviously something else has to happen between there and the closing credits. Krishna Shah (wearing the hats of writer, director, and producer here) fills the time by ineptly spoofing conventional zombie movies of the post-Romero era, occasionally remembering to do something with the fact that these at least started off being very unconventional zombies indeed. What little wit was on display in the first half of the film vanishes completely, to be replaced by an assortment of splatstick comedy skits with only the most tenuous connection to either each other or what came before. (My suspicion is that this part of the movie was actually written and perhaps even shot first, since such a disjointed miscellany would have looked perfectly reasonable playing on the screen in the background of American Drive-In.) The undead band recedes far into the background as the Hitler family are reanimated to prey on the people of Grand Guignol, who then become zombies in turn. Crucially, none of the new townspeople introduced in the second half seem like they belong to the same community as the record-burning, Bible-thumping redneck caricatures we met before. They’re zanier, more affluently suburban, and a great deal more Borsht Belt in their comic presentation. Shah does ultimately tie the second half of Hard Rock Zombies back into the first, but by that point he’d lost my interest completely, and I imagine he’ll lose yours as well.

     There is one positive thing that I want to say about Hard Rock Zombies before wrapping this up, though— and it’s going to sound completely fucking insane. You ready? Here we go: Jack Bliessener’s is the second-best cinematic portrayal of Adolf Hitler I’ve ever seen, following not that far behind Bruno Ganz in Downfall. Bliessener has the pitch, rhythm, and cadence of the real Hitler’s speeches down pat, and although he’s theoretically playing him as an extremely old man, his strangely tense and jerky body language is a perfect match for that of the younger, prewar Hitler. Most striking of all, Bliessener captures something that most other movie Hitlers have been understandably skittish about even attempting: that the real Adolf Hitler was an absurd buffoon as well as the ultimate embodiment of human evil. Part of that, no doubt, is the natural result of Hard Rock Zombies being partly a comedy, but it’s worth remarking on just the same.

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