Biker Zombies From Detroit (2002)
The box says “evil never looked so bad”. I can tell from this little quip that the people who made this had no grand illusions as to what they had done.
Here’s a quick recap of the story:
Satan (I think) is building a gang of some sort to do something evil, who knows what. To do this, he hand picks, via a cheesy Darth Vader wanna-be narrative, each member because they do bad stuff well, like rape, fight and murder people. Then you have this young man, Ken, who lives with his mom and likes off-road motorcycles. They move from Hell, MI to Grosse Point, MI where we catch a glimpse of some of the neighbor boys speaking objectively about 15 year olds and fucking. He tries to start a friendly dialog with them, but they can’t help but have the worst dialog ever. It goes from “Hi, I just moved here!” to “You call that a hair-cut?” faster than you can say “Who wrote this shit, a 13 year old?”. I guess since the neighbors ride crotch rockets and Ken rides a dirt bike, they just can’t get along. Soon enough, Ken is seen by his new found antagonists with a girl that one of them just lied about having sexual relations with. They later see him at a club and confront him by asking him repeatedly “Did you fuck her?” A fight results long after it should have, which ends up with all of them being thrown out of the club and Ken separated from his date who was in the bathroom. A motorcycle chase ensues in which Ken cleverly loses the crotch rocketeers by turning around and going back the other way, something one of the 3 bikers have considerable trouble doing, bringing to mind a certain scene from an Austin Powers movie. Our hero shakes the bad guys only to be caught by our zombie biker gang that has been raising hell in diners and gas stations between scenes of his blossoming relationship. He is thusly killed in a scene that is shot painfully slow for no reason. When the mother and the girlfriend figure out that neither one of them know where he is the next day, they panic, or…I mean, have coffee. Meanwhile the crotch rocketeers are panicking because they saw the murder happen and now the kid is riding by their house and cops are visiting the mother next door. All of the sudden, that night Ken comes back as a zombie and kills the crotch rocketeers one by one with his motorcycle. Then he kills his girlfriend. He’s about to kill his mother when the cops show up and run her over. Outraged, the cops get out and shoot the zombie Ken, first, with a handgun, then successfully with a shotgun… at least, you are led to believe, because there is blood and the cops look down at the ground where the body must be, but the budget must not have had room for a dead zombie Ken. Then the zombie biker gang shows up and looks at the cops which sends the female cop over the edge of sanity into a horrific scream. This is where the 5 minute “wicked cool” close-up of every inch of one of their motorcycles happens just like the opening credits. In fact, exactly like the opening credits. Then Satan has some sort of monologue that was supposed to tie the movie together or something.
I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to take away from this. The zombie bikers had make up that pretty much made them look like Tom Savini in From Dusk Till Dawn on a $5 budget. They rode motorcycles and terrorized businesses, seemingly for no reason. They didn’t actually steal gas form the gas station, they just confronted the owner once he wanted them to pre-pay. When they didn’t come in to do that, he went out with 2 guns and shot at them, like every gas station attendant does went you don’t know to pre-pay. Getting shot made the zombie lady look like she was doing a pop and lock routine. Then they killed the attendant and left without gas.
The camera angles were horrible. More times than not, whoever was talking was looking away from the camera. There were very few scenes, if any, that had more than two camera angles. And everything shot dragged on forever. Any special effect scenes were lingered on far past any actual need. I think they felt that they put so much work into the effects and almost nothing else, that the effects needed as much screen time as possible. Bad acting, bad editing, bad camera framing, bad camera, bad timing, bad lighting, bad music score and no point to the story whatsoever…oooh, except that Detroit has a lot of crime and Satan likes that cuz he can build his zombie biker gang to do bad stuff. The zombie aren’t really even zombies. They’re more like demons. In fact, if you had taken out the zombie biker gang, the movie would have been the same. Except where Ken got killed by zombie bikers, he could’ve gotten killed by the crotch rocketeers. Then at least they would have had a reason to get itchy about the police being around. Then of course, they would have had to title the movie differently and I wouldn’t have watched it to review for ZRC and my life would be fucking sunnier!
In a nutshell, crap movie.
-Jef Porkins
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