WASTELANDS - An Australian B-grade, Punk Rock, Street Trash online radio show exploring the vast undiscovered cultural wastelands as a creative pursuit. Hosted by long time partners in slime Adam (085c3n3) Obscene and Mark-O -Mark, pondering punk oddities, trashy treasures, street levelness, life, culture and stuff.

Episode 15 hardrock zombies.jpg — Episode 15

Metalsploitation - hard Rock Zombies

In this episode Adam and Mark rip through their next Metalsploitation instalment -the video nasty Hard Rock Zombies. This distasteful horror comedy rock musical entry to the sub-genre features hicks, rubes, werewolves, murderous dwarves, sex perverts, and Hitler and that’s all in the first 10 minutes.

In the 80’s, rock music and horror movies went together like acid washed jeans and feathered hair. The trouble is, even though many horror movies had awesome rock soundtracks, the movies that specifically featured rock musician characters as heroes or villains varied wildly in quality. Although the rock horror movie has mostly gone the way of the 80’s, I’m not sure any other type of music will ever have such a successful love affair with horror.

A nameless hard rock band who for some reason have the key broadest from Kraftwerk whose music can raise the dead, travel to that town out of footloose for an auditions with a big record executive, unfortunately Hitler now lives there and they fall prey to his entourage of mutant dwarfs, a flick knife wielding werewolf, a maniac with a wiper sniper and blonde sexy psychopath. They are then resurrected by a 14 year old groupie by who plays one of their songs at their graves the lyrics of which were taken from the Necronomicon and they take undead revenge on their killers

That takes us to the half way point after which it starts to get weird. Actually it doesn’t get any weirder, that would be impossible. It just becomes less coherent.

The first part is mental but at least it makes sense in the context of the movie- the band arrives in town, gets murdered, is resurrected and takes revenge. That’s a complete story – problem is there is still 45 minutes to go.

So the bad guys now get back up again as undead ghouls and attack the town. While the zombie band go through with their audition. It’s important that the audition is there it kinda ties things up but the rest is hilariously pointless and it really leads to some very very strange places.

Highlights / Lowlights

The film starts off promisingly, quickly scoring points for gratuitous use of both nudity and dwarfs,

But rapidly becomes a jaw-dropping bad mish-mash of musical interludes and inept gore (courtesy of FX man John Carl Buechler),

Interspersed with moments of complete insanity: an old man (later to be revealed as Hitler) his wife; the old lady turns into a werewolf;

The hitch-hiker dances by herself for no reason in the desert;

One dwarf eats himself;

The band survives an electrocution while practising; and one guy momentarily avoids being eaten by pretending to be a zombie (beating Shaun of the Dead to the joke by a couple of decades).

Links

Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUQEQP1uGEE

Aussie Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUpo_aRnyqw

Hard Rock Zombies Full movie - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6e_vmO7E3Q&t=37s

Cassie – Music Clip - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zstbQZewKts

Shake it up – Music Clip - https://youtu.be/eMeugKnXVAk

Soundtrack playlist -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thzwNRfWnO4&list=OLAK5uy_lvNnQoKEx0WTzvsCsx3O3hzzyPYezF5Ps