| Chopper Chicks in Zombietown Released: 1989 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Zombie Nuts and Bolts: The Cycle Sluts have moved in on the town of Zariah. And not even midgets, blind orphans, maniacal morticians or somber rednecks can keep them from kicking plenty of zombie ass! Summary: The fact that you even clicked open this page says a lot about you. We start this sideshow off with eight butch biker babes who are cruising down a southwest American highway on their choppers. Calling themselves the Cycle Sluts they are: Rox, the raging bull dyke gang leader whom no one can seem to relate to; Dede, the fire-haired second in command; T.C., a music producer wannabe; Lucille, the token whore; Jojo, a former army officer gone AWOL; Jewel, the aging mother; Rusty, the black biker; and finally Tania, a mute who also happens to be the only attractive one in the whole bunch. As the Sluts ride their choppers down the highway, they pass a chalkboard sign welcoming them to Zariah. Everyone is pretty juiced about stopping in town to get some dick except for Dede. Dede seems to have misgivings about this town. Just as they pass the welcoming sign, which reads Population: 128, a midget with a ladder named Bob Littleton comes out from the bushes. He erases the number 128 from the sign and replaces it with the number 127. Apparently a funeral is about to commence. Inside of Zariah, the local mortician Ralph Willum offers a eulogy at the grave of the recently deceased town butcher. But what the grieving widow doesn’t know is that Ralph has secretly replaced the coffin’s body with several sandbags. The REAL body is in storage at Willum’s funeral home. Now while the Cycle Sluts are hanging out at the local diner, we cut to a scene occurring five miles out of town. A little kid is putzing around the entrance shed to an old mine shaft. He seems to think that his father can be found here. Entering the work quarters to the mine, he finds that the shaft is filled with bloodthirsty ZOMBIES! The zombies eat the nosy little fuck and proceed to bust out of the shed. They begin shambling their way towards the town of Zariah. A mile away from the city we also find a broken down school bus containing angry blind orphans. These guys come complete with big black sunglasses and retractable walking sticks. More on them later. The bikers get finished eating lunch, and Lucille decides that she wants some MEAT! (And I’m not talking about sirloin here.) She drives away from the other Sluts in search of some hearty man-sausage. She doesn’t get a mile down the road before Willum drives along smashing her with his car. Taking her body back to the funeral home he begins to perform an unsavory autopsy upon the deceased. He finds his sniveling toady, Bob Littleton cowering beneath the operating table. For no real reason other than to satiate his own mania, Willum pulls the little fucker out of there and locks him inside of a pine box. He then chucks the coffin into a well challenging Bob to find his way out (Don’t worry. Bob resurfaces moments later). The other bikers decide to split up to sew their wild oats. TC finds some token hillbilly and the two hit it off. Jewel finds a pay phone and calls her son on his birthday. Rusty finds some mechanic and borrows equipment to fix her bike. Jojo busts into some geek’s house robbing him of his virginity. Dede goes to the local church. It is here that we discover that Zariah is actually Dede’s hometown. Her ex-husband Donny (Billy Bob Thornton) finds her in the church and believes that Dede has returned home for good. (Cut to a brief scene showing the zombies reaching the five-mile marker) Rox and Tania go to a bar. Believe it or not, the mullet-headed hillbillies are having a funeral for their ole pal Jimmy-Joe-Billy-Bob-Ezekiel inside of the BAR! Rox disrupts the service by mucking about with the jukebox. She turns off Conway Twitty and puts on some bluesy sounding rock and roll song called “Do what your big momma told ya”. Rox begins dancing around singing and the rednecks start getting a little pissed at her. A fight ensues and Rox and Tania carry the melee outside the bar. (There’s a very amusing scene where we see the coffin being flung through the window of the bar.) The drunken sheriff Fred Bugiere decides that he wants to break up the fracas. However, saucy Willum doesn’t want this to happen. He needs the Cycle Sluts in order to turn them into zombies. While the bikers engage the angry rednecks, Willum stabs Fred in the neck and takes him back to his schoolhouse/mortuary. Now while all this is going on, the bikers and the rednecks are ready to throw down. But Jojo forces them to back off when she brandishes a live hand grenade. After the rednecks leave, Rox learns that Dede has a husband in the town. I guess this goes against their dyke biker code or something because Rox kicks her out of the group. They hop on their hogs and take off leaving Dede behind. Meanwhile, the zombies reach the 2-mile marker. Dede goes to see her husband Don. Don tries to rekindle their relationship, but Dede isn’t having it. She mentions how she can’t hack living a ‘normal’ lifestyle. (Yeah right. Like anything that goes on in THIS podunk chicken-fucker town could ever be construed as normal.) Together they decide to try and find Lucille who hasn’t come back yet. They wind up in Willum’s funeral home where they find the zombified meat-wench Lucille. Willum is there putting a battery pellet into the empty skull of sheriff Fred. Donny is killed and Dede manages to escape. Willum has a wild necrophilia experience with Lucille’s corpse. Dede manages to catch up with the rest of the Cycle Sluts where she challenges Rox for leadership in the gang. They get into a pretty silly fight involving switchblades and whips. The fight only ends when the mute Tania decides to speak up for the first time. Yelling, “Stop”, she gets the two to stop fighting. The zombies meanwhile, have finally gotten into town and have succeeded in blowing up an old farmhouse. The bikers hear the commotion and arrive on the scene. Jewel enters the burning house to rescue a baby. As people begin to gather around, Jewel gives the baby over to the rednecks. The zombies then attack the hillbillies and the bikers take this opportunity to vamoose. Further down the street, another group of zombies decide to attack the blind orphans. (Remember them?) The Cycle Sluts come upon them and Jewel tries racing through a zombie gauntlet in order to save the blind orphans (Who all carry machine guns for some reason). Anyway, she gets attacked and her cycle skids under the bus blowing it up. The explosion takes out a healthy chunk of the zombies. Bob the toady shows up and decides that he no longer wants to be Willum’s little fuck-puppet. He helps the orphans into his car and tells the Dyker gang the skinny on Willum. Apparently Willum was some mad-fuck genius that worked for the government. Underground nuclear tests were conducted at the sight where the Zariah mineshafts were maintained. Since the radiation in the shafts was too deadly to living workers, Willum created zombies to perform the labor. In exchange, he took half of the net profit from the mines. (They never tell you exactly what Willum’s zombies were mining for, but I suspect that it was likely nougat.) Bob only agreed to work for him because he promised to make him tall. Obviously Willum neglected to keep his promise. The bikers head back into Zariah leaving the orphans in the care of Bob. They meet up with the chicken-fucker committee who offers them 500 bucks to leave town. Rox gets her penis in a twitch over the whole affair and quits the group. She takes off into the desert on her bike. While wandering through the flats, she is attacked by some more deadheads. She is just about to get her ass kicked when Dede shows up. Dede chucks a grenade into the fray and the zombies are blown into little wriggling chunks of gooey red gelatin. This pretty much eases the tensions between Rox and Dede. Rox rejoins the Cycle Sluts and they all head back to Main Street to kick a little zombie ass. They go after them with a wide array of weapons including baseball bats, garrote wires, chainsaws, blowtorches and even a staple gun. Fighting their way past the zombies, they retreat to a hardware store. They steal a bunch of explosives and embark upon a plan to rid the town of Zariah of their living corpse problem. They chain big slabs of meat to the back of their cycles and lure all the zombies to the town church. Bob and the blind orphans are at the church as well. They keep the zombies at bay with some semi-automatic weapons while Dede sets the charge. Quickly exiting the church, the entire building explodes in a blaze of fire roasting all of the zombies. Meanwhile outside, Willum hops in his car in order to get out of town. However, there’s a zombie in the back seat who tries to take control of the wheel. Willum tries to get out through passenger side window, but the zombie closes the window cutting the old man’s head off. The evil mad mortician is dead, the zombies are destroyed and the good-and-simple townsfolk of Zariah are free to return to their moonshine-brewing incestuous ways. The Cycle Sluts ride off into the night. Acting/Dialogue: This is a Troma film, what do you expect? Of COURSE the acting sucks! But to their credit, these fine young ladies do manage to pull off some halfway decent impersonations of a group of burly pissed off men. I was actually convinced that army reject Jojo WAS a man up until the scene where she fucks the virgin. Now while, the acting is your typical over-accentuated b-grade splatter-cheese hatchet work, its actually the urban 80s dialogue that makes us want to laugh out loud. The bulk of the dialogue consists of little more than machismo bull dyke posturing, but throughout this quagmire of quirkidom, I have found several lines that were actually quite funny. The poor acting is easy to ignore however in lieu of the wild dynamic sewn between this rebellious horde of hormonally challenged cycle riding thespians. (Come on; you KNEW I had to make a thespians crack in here somewhere.) Billy Bob Thornton makes an early appearance here in the role of Dede’s husband Donny. Billy Bob does what Billy Bob does best; act like a redneck. (With a name like Billy Bob what more can one expect?) Gore: The gore is kind of cool looking here, but we really don’t get to see much until the last leg of this marrow-munching marathon. Dede blows some zombies up with a grenade and we see one poor shmoe ambling about on his knee-stumps. Baseball bat in hand, she takes to these clowns like Sammy Souza on crack. Heads are routinely seen rolling around the pavement. She even catches one zombie in the nuts with a CHAINSAW! Ouch! And I thought I was a headhunter. Rusty roasts a zombie’s head with a blowtorch and T.C. vainly tries to stop one by shooting staples into its face. (???) Guilty Pleasures: How can you have an exploitation film and not have any titties? Holy shit, this isn’t the Broadway rendition of MacBeth here guys! This film is DESIGNED to appeal to the cretins of the galaxy. How come there ain’t no BOOBIES! What a downer! How can I successfully execute my master plan to de-evolve my entire gender by subjecting myself to hours of exploitation films if the exploitation is non-existent? Me no like. The Good: If you don’t have enough money to buy any good designer drugs, then I think you will find that Chopper Chicks in Zombietown passes as an adequate substitute in an effort to lower your overall brain cell count. Even the mentally retarded will feel like Albert Einstein after digesting this miasma of mental monkey mush. I love films that dare to be offensive. In one fell swoop, Chopper Chicks from Zombietown succeeds in alienating: women, men, midgets, the blind, the retarded, the homosexual and chicken-fucking, square-dancing, Schlitz-drinking Hee Haw watching, mullet-wearing, cud-chewing, cow-tipping toothless Appalachian trailer trash hillbilly rednecks across the globe! Yeeeeeeeeee-Hawwwwwww! You won’t find this kind of entertainment by watching Fort Apache. Believe it or not, I actually found an interesting cinematic theme at work here. There is an extremely subtle contrast between the Cycle Sluts and the late citizens of Zariah. The entire driving theme behind the bikers is that these are eight women who passionately try to disassociate themselves from their past lives. But every now and again, a strange tether reels each of them back to the life they knew before they became a carpet-crunching she-bitch on wheels. Jewel painfully tries to bond with her son during a hurried telephone call on the boy’s birthday. T.C. laments the fact that she wanted to be a music producer before becoming a biker. Jojo is an army deserter, but she can still be found sporting her camouflage fatigues, combat boots, dog tags and even a hand grenade. And although she may have returned to her hometown, Dede can’t escape the fact that she was once Zariah’s homecoming Queen with an abandoned husband waiting in the wings. Now compare this to what we see from the zombies and you will find that the complete opposite is working here. These guys are instantly set apart from the norm of society due to the fact that they are FUCKING DEAD. (Doesn’t make them bad people mind you. Just makes them smelly.) And although they’re brainless, they desperately try to re-assert themselves back into their daily routines. We even see a couple of zombies sitting out on the stoop drinking some hooch. One deadhead returns home to re-join his family. (The son says that he can stay so long as he agrees no to eat no one.) Other zombies continue wearing the accoutrements that identified them while they were alive. Now while I’m sure the producers had zero intention of illustrating such a cinematic example, I find that the dichotomy between the two groups works out rather well. (See. I can make ANY movie sound like Citizen Kane can’t I?) The best part of the movie comes from the intermission segues. About once every fifteen minutes or so, we cut from the main action and focus on the zombies as they slowly plod their way from the mines back to Zariah. With each intermission the zombies get about two miles closer to town. The scenes are scored with weird, sideshow carnival polka music complete with slide whistles, accordions and trombones. I think the guys in the orchestra later went on to become the Insane Clown Posse after scoring this film. This is a movie that should never be taken seriously no matter HOW good the barbiturates may be. This is the perfect way to spend a rainy afternoon with some pals, a bowl of nachos and some cheap malt liquor. I LOVE this demented sort of shit. Remember folks. Just because they’re kin, doesn’t mean they have the right to breathe your air. The Bad: This is not a film for the politically correct. But to be honest, if you are the pious righteous God fearing Christian type, then you have no business watching trailer trash lesbian splatter films like this anyway. (Unless you’re an archbishop that is) The one thing that turned me off to this film was the poor direction. Director Dan Hoskins leaps about from scene to scene and it becomes dizzyingly difficult to keep track of what exactly is going on. Elements are thrown out there that become little more than big dangling question marks. Case in point: The blind orphans. What purpose did these losers serve? They accomplished dildo-squat throughout the course of this film. I at least expected most of them to die just so we could get some good splatter going on. But no, they all live. Not only do they live, but they’re strapped as well. At some point these clowns acquired automatic weapons. Although I have to admit, there is something perversely humorous about a blind kid opening up an Uzi upon a horde of zombies. Bob’s relationship with Willum is pretty fucking bizarre as well. Willum locks the little fucker in a coffin and chucks him into a well. The little smurf escapes and laments to himself about how he is “…a bad bad boy.” Willum makes him feel even smaller when he tells him that if God had wanted him to be normal he would have made him a normal size. In truth, I was kind of hoping that Bob would be the one to finally do Willum in. But hey, what can you expect from a guy who’s only three apples high. In the end, this is a film that was tailor made to be shitty. (Or should I say TRAILER made?) If you rented a movie with the title Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and actually EXPECTED to see a gripping compelling drama then you are a Class-A filtered retard and you have no business owning a remote control. Hell, you shouldn’t even be allowed access to a television much less the internet where you can poison impressionable minds with your mindless mongoloidal ineptitude. Stop renting horror flicks. Save your money and get a vasectomy because God forbid if your kind should ever be allowed to reproduce. Oh…and if anyone reading this review happens to be on of the chicken-fucking, square-dancing, Schlitz-drinking Hee Haw watching, mullet-wearing, cud-chewing, cow-tipping toothless Appalachian trailer trash hillbilly rednecks that I mentioned above…yeah I thought Billy Bob deserved an Oscar nomination for this flick too. Great Lines: “You’re the sluts! Try and act like it!” --Rox giving a pep talk. “What the fuck. Why dwell on it!” --Willum giving the eulogy at the butcher’s funeral. “If God had wanted me to do normal stuff, he would have made me look like normal people.” --Bob the midget. “Mama, what’s a bull dyke?” “Jesus! It’s uh…it’s uh…one of those things they put in the road to keep the cows from crossing it.” --Jewel talking to her son Timmy-Bob. “I didn’t do it for science. And I didn’t do it for glory. I’m just MEAN!” --Willum talking to Fred the cop’s corpse. “My tongue has been places you don’t even know you’ve got!” --Rox yelling at the Cycle Sluts. “I may be a whore, but I ain’t no heathen.” --Rusty feeling reluctant about fighting zombies in a church. Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 severed heads. (I would’ve given it a six if there were more gore and boobies) |
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