Rock and roll zombies, midget Nazi rednecks, a grandma who turns into a werewolf, a nearly mute young girl with Groucho Marx's eyebrows, and Adolph Hitler himself—how can you go wrong with a lineup like that? Well, it's pretty easy, but only if by "wrong" you mean "bad." This isn't a good movie by any measure. But it's intermittently fun, it has a few good laughs, and it has possibly the weirdest zombie behavior I've seen. It's atrocious, but in an enjoyble way. Except for the music, which is not enjoyable in any way.

I suppose it's the music that really sinks the film. It's really terrible, sub-1980s hair metal, awful stuff that wouldn't have gotten on the radio even in the darkest hours of that bad-music decade. It's painfully bad. It hurt my feelings. For some reason, I think that the filmmakers thought the music was good, because large swaths of the movie are basically music videos, in which the terrible band puts on a terrible show. One particularly bad song, "Cassie's Song," is played three times during the course of the film, in addition to one a capella rendition.

The film follows the exploits of an unnamed hair-metal band. Jessie (E.J. Curcio) and his bandmates are touring somewhere rural (it looks southern, but I think it was supposed to be California), where they play bad music to people who look like the cast of redneck John Hughes films. They are a high-energy band, and they won't be put off by dire warnings from mysterious prepubescent girls with Groucho Marx eyebrows. When one such girl, Cassie (Jennifer Coe) warns Jessie to avoid her crazy town, he ignores her, because he loves her. Sounds about right.

Anyway, the band travels to the town in question and stages a high-energy but really ridiculous sort of musical montage, during which they clown around and interact with admiring women while ugly men in stained shirts look disapprovingly on. They're quickly thrown in jail, but just as quickly bailed out by the weirdest family this side of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The family consists of a mysterious woman (Lisa Toothman) who looks like she crawled off Whitesnake's car in a music video, an old woman (Susan Prevatte) who really likes sex but turns into a werewolf sometimes, one small person who looks relatively normal, one small person who looks like an accident at the Goonie factory, and Adolph Hitler (Jack Bliesener), who plans to take over the world. We've heard that noise before, Adolph.

So the show must go on, but it's hard to perform when you've been murdered by crazy redneck Nazi midgets. Thankfully, Jessie had discovered an ancient song that raises the dead when played, and the band members turn into zombies who do the Robot. You remember the Robot, that jerky dance from the 1980s where you looked like a dancing robot? The Robot. These Hard Rock Zombies emerge from their graves doing the Robot. I hoped they would start breakdancing, but they never got around to it. They wreak their horrible revenge on the redneck Nazi family, which then comes back to life as zombies and wreaks horrible revenge on the entire town. This doesn't concern the band, though: they've got to put on the mother of all rock shows for a big-time producer before they can rest in peace. And they have to do the Robot. And save the world. And save the girl.

You already know, probably after reading the title, whether you're going to watch this film. The only reason I reviewed it is that it's fun to write about... probably more fun than it was to watch. There were some funny scenes, and the complete disregard for internal logic or plot was refreshing, but too much of the film was painful to watch. Zombie lovers who watch movies for the gore will be disappointed, as there was very little blood, and the blood that was present was pretty amateurish. I don't know who would enjoy this film, really.