• Written and directed by Dan Hoskins
• Starring
  • Jamie Rose
  • Catherine Carlen
  • Lycia Naff
  • Vicki Frederick
  • Don Calfa

Because it’s distributed by Troma, you can rightly assume that Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town is a silly movie. (That’s if the sound of the title didn’t clue you in.) But independent productions picked up for distribution by Troma are often a different breed of silly from Troma’s home-grown productions. In other words, this is not a movie in which everything is “gratuitous” (sex and nudity, over-the-top gore, fart and effluvium jokes, general intentional campiness). It’s certainly not a serious film, and most of the elements of Troma films listed above are present in some degree (though I don’t recall any fart jokes). Maybe you could call it “Troma-lite” — and depending on your comfort level and patients with the sophomoric excess of Troma’s in-house productions, that may be a good or bad thing.

The first sign that we’ve dialed back from the extremes is the chopper chicks of the title, an all-girl motorcycle gang called the Cycle Sluts, who are to a woman fit and aerobicized, permed and hairsprayed. There’s not a garish tattoo or stretch mark among them; they look like cross between The Go-Go’s and a Whitesnake video. Heck, they don’t even put on their denim vests with “Cycle Sluts” painted across the back until they’re ready to roll into town — in this case, Zariah, California, population 128. Excuse me, 127; right after the gang zooms by the sign, a dwarf (Ed Gale) in a natty suit comes and changes the sign.

These are the chicks. These are their choppers. This is their story.

In what’s made itself apparent to me as a distressingly common pattern in zombie films, the plot is split in two tracks — we’ll call them the “zombie” track and the “main characters” track — for a third to a half of the movie, until the dead finally impinge upon whatever drama our protagonists have gotten themselves embroiled in. Since just about everyone who watches this movie does so for the zombies more than the biker chicks, let’s take a look at that one first:

There’s a mine outside town which is boarded up in the haphard balsa-wood fashion is that is the standard for contractors who deal with such things. A young boy on his bike enters through the slats and discovers that, a dozen feet inside, there’s a wall of concrete blocks with a reinforced door and a padlock. The fact that the padlock is there, though, doesn’t necessarily imply that it is locked; the boy lifts the padlock off the hasp, opens the door, and hey — zombies in their best burial dress! (Also hey — end of little boy!) The undead shuffle their way out of the mine, demolishing in the process the boards securely obstructing their entrance, and begin lurching toward town. As that’s a good five miles, we can leave them there as we catch up with the rest of the movie.

Okay, I’ll take the dwarf in the church with the revolver.  No, the candlestick!  In the conservatory!  Colonel Mustard!  Aaagh!

The zombies are the handiwork of the undertaker Willum (Don Calfa) and Bob the dwarf, Willum’s indentured servant. The scheme, as it comes to light throughout the course of the movie, is this: The mine was closed because mining radioactive ore became too dangerous for the locals. Then Willum moved in and started engineering the string of “accidental” deaths which have plagued the down for the last two years, using Bob to do most of the dirty work. Willem then reanimates the corpses by planting an electrode in their skulls, and locks them in the mine to continue mining. I don’t know how much useful ore gets mined out by workers who just barely know that they shouldn’t eat their own foot, but I obviously haven’t put as much though into this plan as Willem.

And now, the dramatic storyline: Once the Sluts have made their presence known in town, they split up for a little R&R, which for several of them means finding a temporary boy-toy. This gives each of them an occasion for “characterization,” i.e., “why I’m so broken inside that I think that riding around aimlessly is a viable alternative.” I guess I haven’t watched enough biker movies; do male bikers blowing into town immediately find willing women who are intrigued by their free-spiritishness? The main Slut who abstains is their leader, Rox (Catherine Carlen), who proudly proclaims herself a bulldyke and enjoys discomfiting the locals more than seeking any personal perks. This includes interrupting a wake being held at the local bar and doing a nasty bump’n'grind routine to what she can find on the jukebox.

It should be noted that Dede (Jamie Rose), the de facto second-in-command of the Sluts and possessor of a crest of spiral permed red hair that gives her the silhouette of Gossamer, has more than a random interest to this town. She in fact grew up here, was homecoming queen (heaven only knows where they found enough students for a high school), and she even has an abandoned husband Tommy (an early role for Billy Bob Thornton) who’s happy to have her back after a six-year absence. No particular answer is ever given to Donny’s question of why Dede left in the first place, a question which I think quite respectable.

Hitchhiking is always harder in groups.

It’s only once we’ve met our quotient of melodrama that things start happening. Mostly because of Rox’s actions at the wake, the locals gang up to drive the Sluts out of town. Rox makes it a point to leave Dede behind when she finds out about Dede’s connections to the town. But that abandonment, plus the absence of another of their members (who has been purposely run down by Willem and turned into a zombie) creates a lot of friction among the Sluts, who don’t get very far.

Meanwhile, Dede, caught between the world that rejected her and the world she doesn’t want back into, discovers the bike of the missing Slut and stumbles onto Willem’s who reanimating scheme. So she goes for help to the only people she knows have the balls for this kind of thing: the Cycle Sluts.

There’s plenty of back-and-forth and shallow “human drama” stuff, so let’s answer some important questions:

Q) Do the zombies look good?
A) Not too shabby. They’re all dressed in their good burial clothes, too, which gives them an edge on the “victim of contagion” zombies who too often look like college extras.

The Idea Machine. Patent pending.

Q) Do the zombies eat flesh?
A) Yes, though not consistently; some of them are a little preoccupied (they all get out of the mine groaning, “Home!”). And while many do gnaw on the living, they don’t spend time fondling entrails.

Q) Headshots?
A) Well, yeah, since an electrode implanted in the head is what reanimates them, disabling their heads is kind of important. However, thanks to a blessed lack of firearms, what we get is mostly baseball-bat beheadings, garrotings, and blowtorches to the face. And by not wasting their efforts on the torso once the head damage rule is discovered, the Sluts prove themselves smarter than 95% of zombie movie protagonists.

Q) Are they communicable?
A) I would love to think that this questions is stupid; after all, the dead are raised via an electronic devide inserted in the skull — how could one be infected by that? But stupider things have been done in zombie films, so… No.

Q) Are there blind orphans in this movie?
A) Why, yes, and thanks for asking, since otherwise I would have had trouble working them into the plot synopsis. Yes, near Zariah is St. Peter’s Home For Blind Orphans (talk about niche marketing!), and a busload of them is stranded on the road by engine trouble during all of this. However, thanks to the hobby of one of their counselors (who presumably succumbs to the zombie menace offscreen), they are blind orphans with an UZI.

Flasks? Of colored liquids? But that must mean — there’s SCIENCE going on here!

It’s a cheap little movie, and I’m sure that a more highbrow critic, if forced to watch, would lambaste the whole enterprise as being unworthy of the effort it took to make it. But it holds a certain endearing charm for me. Maybe it’s the fact that the protagonists are actually sorta likable (and believe me, I have no preexisting affinity toward biker gangs). Maybe it’s the fact that the villain Willum announces, “I didn’t do it for science, and I didn’t do it for glory — I’m just mean!” Maybe it’s the presence of a dwarf who says, in his best Lou Costello impression, “I’ve been a baaad boy!” Maybe it’s the use of cheesy arrangements of “Danse Macabre” in the score, including one scene in which it’s plinked out by an ice cream truck. Maybe it’s the climactic plan which involved blowing up a church, with the blind orphans acting as bait inside, singing “O Holy Night” at the top of their lungs. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the realization that all of us, even unrepentant Cycle Sluts, are just looking for love.

Okay, maybe not that. (Although they are.)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 9
• breasts: 0
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• dwarfs: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Lycia Naff (T.C., the Cycle Slut who used to be a groupie) played “Ensign Sonya Gomez” in two TNG episodes
  • Earl Boen (the butcher — I think he gets one line, and that’s after he’d dead) played “Nagilum” in the TNG episode “Where Silence Has Lease” (plus voicework in a whol bunch of Star Trek videogames)
  • Rob King (”Vince”) performed stunts in Star Trek 6