In an era when American movies are beginning to resemble gooey valentines from the White House exhorting us to behave ourselves, New York-based Troma Films boldly continues the tradition of passionately bad taste. A Troma flick is always a welcome holiday from the relentlessly nice images
that assault us daily on TV and elsewhere. And now, the people who brought us THE TOXIC AVENGER and FAT GUY GOES NUTZOID have unveiled CHOPPER CHICKS IN ZOMBIETOWN, a masterwork of heroic badness.
Wrapped in luxuriously filthy, butt-hugging leather, Rox (Catherine Carlin) is the leader of an all-gal motorcycle gang called the Cycle Sluts. This wild bunch of babes is mean, brazen and blow dried. "In a lot of towns there's someone who wants to make out," explains one of the gang members, "so
we take 'em." But these amazons also have painful histories, like the red-headed Dede (Jamie Rose), who harbors a secret desire to return to her homemaking roots.
Trouble arrives when the Cycle Sluts ride into a town called Zariah and encounter mad mortician Ralph William (Don Calfa), who is engaged in slowly murdering the town's populace and turning them into flesh-eating zombies. This mortician has also sadistically enslaved a soft-voiced dwarf named Bob
(Ed Gale) to do his most evil bidding. And, to make matters worse, a bus carrying a group of blind orphans on a school field trip has broken down right next to the zombies' lair. The chopper chicks come to the rescue and the movie whirls into a fast-paced carnival of motorcycles, whips, leather,
feminism, cannibalism, fellatio, blood, gore and moments of disarming wit.
Writer-director Dan Hoskins keeps this preposterous nonsense from ever getting dull. He is aided by Catherine Carlen, playing the bulldyke gang leader role with real verve. She gets to do a raunchy bump and grind to a jukebox song and also delivers the movie's best line. When a fellow cycle slut
calls Rox a twisted sister she responds: "You bet your ass, mamma! I'm a big bad bulldyke and my tongue has been places you don't even know you've got and it's great! And I don't 'deal' with it. I don't 'cope' with it. I'm fucking proud of it! What the fuck are you proud of?" That might be the
most unrepentent homage to bulldykism ever put onscreen.
Don Calfa as Ralph Willum, the mortician, contributes a big all-out camp performance which doesn't amuse nearly as much as the performers who are actually taking their roles seriously. Like Ed Gale, as Bob the Dwarf, who has some moments of real emotional power and also has the best comic timing
in the cast. It should also be mentioned that the synthesized score by Daniel May is unusually eclectic and witty.
This is not to say that CHOPPER CHICKS IN ZOMBIE TOWN avoids the usual low-budget pitfalls. Its faults include very poor sound; the same ten extras who seem to pop up over and over again in different makeup; and an almost perverse neglect of continuity that often makes the movie very confusing.
But it has three major explosions featuring flames and ignited bodies and at a running time of 84 minutes that means an an average explosion every 24 minutes. That kind of attention to detail makes me forgive the tiny flaws.
Besides, if I have to choose between the incoherent, smarmy and dull FIELD OF DREAMS and the incoherent, trashy and offensive CHOPPER CHICKS IN ZOMBIE TOWN ... I'll follow the chicks! (Violence, profanity, sexual situations.) leave a comment
