by ghosty » Tue May 10, 2011 1:59 pm
I stand corrected. A Nazi midget zombie indeed!
Here's a review from IMDB that I feel best sums this flick up:
Is the movie worth sitting through... for the ultimate rock concert?, 13 February 2009
Author: Chromium_five from the wild frontier
"Hard Rock Zombies" raises the intriguing question: if a movie's plot involves a metal band being killed by Nazis and rising from the grave to deliver the ultimate rock concert, is it possible for that movie NOT to be awesome? The answer is no, but I admit there were moments when I had my doubts. This was mainly because of the movie's unfortunate habit of taking scenes that COULD be funny if they lasted a minute or two but instead dragging them out to the length of the first ice age. The most egregious instance of this comes when the rockers arrive in the town of Grand Guignol and upset the locals with outrageous antics such as juggling beer cans and miming; the camera cuts to three townspeople looking on disapprovingly SO MANY TIMES that I thought the DVD was getting stuck in the player. Out of curiosity, I went back later to count the total number of these cuts, and I lost track at *30.* That's not an exaggeration: the filmmakers really thought the best way to convey the full emotional complexity of this scene was to show us the same three guys frowning over *30 times.*
Such scenes are minor annoyances, however, compared to when the rockers become zombies and head to the concert hall for what is supposedly the ultimate rock concert; to my horror, they played to a completely empty room and worse yet, chose some kind of terrible glam love ballad called "Cassie's Song." The Jonas Brothers rock more than this song. Worse STILL, the song takes place only about an hour into the movie, meaning I had to brace myself for many more scenes of God knows what, devoid of any rocking whatsoever. These scenes were so awful that I needn't bother describing them at length; most of the town's residents are transformed into ghouls through a convoluted process that I didn't understand (mainly because the character explaining it delivers his lines like he has no tongue), and the remaining humans defend themselves using cardboard cutouts of celebrity heads.
This portion of the movie would no doubt drive a lesser person to suicide, but being the resilient man that I am, I stuck with it to the end; and I'm glad I did, because it turns out the genius director was lulling me into a false sense of security and what I THOUGHT was the alleged ultimate rock concert halfway through was in fact a mere teaser for the REAL ultimate rock concert. The rockers arise from their graves yet again, and instead of playing "Cassie's Song," they play a Judas Priest-style riff that is so godlike in its rocking it drives all the ghouls into an underground Nazi gas chamber, where they perish. The gas chamber scene is briefly intercut by a shot of a ghoul EATING ITS OWN HEAD, which is easily one of the strangest images I've ever seen. This final sequence is sufficiently cool enough to seal the movie's place in the pantheon of great 80's garbage, but Christ almighty, did we have to go through some hoops to get there. Regardless, any viewer having made it to the end will have no objections to my rating this 8/10. Recommended.