Crew
Director/Producer – Krishna Shah, Screenplay – David Ball & Krishna Shah, Photography – Tom Richmond, Music – Paul Sabu, Makeup Effects – John Carl Buechler, Art Direction – Cynthia A. Sowder. Production Company – Patel-Shah Film Company.
Cast
E.J. Curcio (Jessie), Geno Andrews (Tommy), Sam Mann (Chuck), Mick Manz (Robbie), Jennifer Coe (Cassie), Lisa Toothman (Elsa), Jack Bliesner (Adolf Hitler), Ted Wells (Ron), Richard Vidan (Sheriff), David Scjroeder [Schroeder] (Cassie’s Father), Michael Simms (Don Matson), H.G. Golas [Phil Fondacaro (Mickey), Nadia (Eva), Vincent De Stefano (Olaf), Emmanuel Shipow (Grandfather), Susan Prevatie (Wolf Lady), John Drake (Old Man/Ancient Man)
Plot
A rock band are due to play in a small town but are warned away by Cassie, a local fan. They proceed anyway where they are welcomed by Elsa and offered a place to stay at her creepy family mansion. In an effort to shut down the concert, the town locals pass an ordinance banning all rock music. The band are determined to play on because an important record company executive will be appearing at the concert. However, the members of the band are all then killed by the people at the mansion, who are in reality Nazis, including a very much alive Adolf Hitler. The lead singer Jessie has given Cassie a song he wrote using an ancient Latin text. Unknowingly, this is an occult spell that causes the band to return from the dead after she plays it by their graveside. As the resurrected band go on to play the concert, the song causes the Nazis and other townspeople to turn into zombies.
Krishna Shah (1938-2013) was an Indian immigrant to the USA where he enjoyed some success as a playwright on Broadway in the 1960s. Shah moved over to film and wrote a handful of tv episodes in the 1960s and 70s, before making his directorial debut with the social drama The River Niger (1976) and going on to the Indian-shot adventure film Shalimar (1978) and Cinema Cinema (1979), a documentary on Indian cinema. He then made the US comedy American Drive-In (1985). Hard Rock Zombies started out as a film-within-a-film that was intended to be playing on the drive-in screen in American Drive-In, before it was decided to invest more money to produce it as a film in its own right. In addition to these, Shah also produced Evil Laugh (1986) and Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor (1992). Hard Rock Zombies was picked up for distribution by Cannon Films.
The 1980s brought a peculiar spate of hard rock and heavy metal themed films. These include Rocktober Blood (1984), Trick or Treat (1986), Rock‘n’Roll Nightmare (1987), Slaughterhouse Rock (1987), Black Roses (1988) and Hard Rock Nightmare (1988). I am not quite sure why they became so popular in this period – it may have something to do with the way 70s metal morphed into big hair metal and became much more of a teenage phenomenon. At the same time, heavy metal became much flamboyant and performative, particularly with the popularity of groups like Kiss and Alice Cooper, which in turn brought a big parental movement protesting against such because of Satanic themes.
Your first reaction to Hard Rock Zombies is aaargh! The sight of being thrown back deep into the midst of 1980s mullets, big hair, guys in pink g-strings, crop t-shirts, or shorts that are so high they just about show fairly much everything is not a pretty one. There is a broad, occasionally amusingly satiric tone during the town council meeting where the locals gets together and vote to ban the concert on the grounds of hidden satanic messages in the music, it promoting drugs, sex and masturbation! All of which feels like a barely exaggerated version of various concerned parental groups during the day.
The film seems set up to go one way – ultra-conservative parents vs rockers – but then goes in a third direction we get the introduction of Nazis! This is the point that Hard Rock Zombies goes WTF. First the rockers are killed – one is killed after joining Lisa Toothman in the shower where she stabs him, replete with references to Psycho (1960); the grandmother turns into a knife-wielding werewolf; another gets killed by a Nazi wielding a weed whacker; and a dwarf Nazi (who we later see transformed into a zombie and trying to devour a cow). All before the aging patriarch (Jack Bliesner) stands up, pulls his old age mask off and reveals that he is really Adolf Hitler and has a world conquest plan.
There is not much rhyme or reason to what happens. Adolf Hitler is alive and seemingly only in his forties (rather than in his mid-nineties that he would be if he were alive in the 1980s). The rockers are revived when sweetly innocent Jennifer Coe plays the song that E.J. Curcio wrote for her based on a Latin text – as zombies, the band look like knockoffs of Kiss. They go ahead and play the concert. Somehow in the midst of this the Nazis are turned into zombies but the townspeople drive them off by wielding placards with pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. Jennifer Coe is taken away as a virgin sacrifice but is saved at the last minute, while the zombies are lured into a bunker where Hitler opens pipes filled with poison gas that kill them off.
Trailer here
Better quality French trailer here