Biker Zombies from Detroit

A few years ago, Sara received the greatest gift ever from my family dice game.  The game is one of those games you play around Christmas where everybody is fighting over a wrapped present and then you open it up and it ends up being a blank VHS tape or something.  But on that particular year, Sara won a copy of Biker Zombies from Detroit.  I have been dying to watch this for years, but somehow I never really got a chance.  So finally, when my brother was here, I finally got around to it.

There was absolutely no plot whatsoever, the acting was terrible, the sound quality was terrible, a lot of the shots were fresh out of art school, and last but not least, there weren’t actually any zombies.  Let me repeat that, Biker Zombies from Detroit didn’t contain any zombies, nor did it take place in Detroit.

So the movie starts with a 10 minute montage of shots of a motorcycle with a voice over from the head zombie or whatever he is.  This scene was unnecessarily long and annoying, but I understand they wanted to have a voice over. Unfortunately, this exact same montage was then repeated at the end of the movie for absolutely no reason whatsoever.  My best guess is that they needed to make it longer (even though it still ended 20 minutes shy of the listed run time).  I thought the soundtrack was actually okay, but it was mixed badly so it was hard to hear the dialog over the music.  I actually thought the dialog wasn’t too far off, although I was the only one who held that opinion.  But look, I watch a lot of crap movies and it really wasn’t that bad.  Unfortunately the writer tried way, way, WAY too hard to put foul language and vulgarity in there, forcing it in where it didn’t make any sense.  I feel like he fancied himself a Quentin Tarantino or a Kevin Smith, but it didn’t feel natural the way it does when they write it.  But if you could have removed that, I think it had promise.  I’m just saying with a little experience he may have a future in script writing. And to be fair, this wasn’t exactly Daniel Day Lewis delivering the lines here.  Instead it was 30 something “actors” who I’m guessing were the director’s friends, playing 14 and 15 year olds.  And why didn’t they reshoot the two different scenes where someone messed up their lines?  It’s not like they were paying the actors so much they couldn’t afford the time.

Okay, but those are the technical aspects, how about the storyline?

SPOILER ALERT (didn’t want to ruin it for you)

Well, there wasn’t one.  The zombies aren’t really zombies, just like regular people with ghoul-like faces or something. The entire movie takes place in some suburb which really could be anytown U.S.A.  Half of the movie revolves around the main zombie guy “recruiting” zombies for his zombie army or something, but that doesn’t even play into the movie. Meanwhile the new guy in town who we are supposed to believe is tough (even though he rides around on a dirt bike and can in no way be considered a biker) has some romance story or something.  He fights with the losers next door and then the zombie master decides to turn him into a zombie because he has a “special project” for him.  There is absolutely no logic to that at all.  The zombies are supposedly in Detroit, so why do they even know or care about this dude?  And what is the special mission, that he kills like these 2 or 3 people that he knows?  Why does the zombie master even care?  As long as we are asking rhetorical questions, why was there a random homeless guy with a sack that kept showing up after the zombies attacked but seemed to have nothing to do with the movie whatsoever?  Why did the Shell station attendant and the cops just start blasting away as soon as they saw the zombies?  I mean, they really just looked like people in makeup and I doubt that people would just start shooting before they were even threatened or anything.  I don’t know, maybe the zombies are scarier in person or something.

Now, I realize I have been harping on the bad points and not pointing out the good points.  This movie had two of the most fantastically bad scenes ever, and the best (worst) line of dialog I have ever heard.  The dialog is not suitable for printing on a nice PG blog like this one, so you will just have to watch for it when you see the movie.  The 2nd best scene took place after the main guy turns into a zombie.  He knocks a guy to the ground and then slowly backs his dirt bike onto the guy’s crotch and then revs the engine causing a jet of blood and gore to just fly all over the place.  The scene goes on and on with the guy screaming and the whole time, even while the zombie was slowly backing the bike up, the guy on the ground never makes even the slightest attempt to get away or even shift slightly so as not to be torn up by the tire.  The best scene though was one we had to rewind and watch about 5 times in a row.  The main-guy-who-is-now-a-zombie’s mom comes running out of the house and he pushes her in front of a car.  The car is already stopping and can’t be going more than 5 mph at the time.  Also, the guy doesn’t really push her enough to go in front of the car, so she has to sort of jog the last few feet to make sure she gets in front of the car.  Oh the indignity, having to jog to your own death.  Well, since they aren’t really zombies, maybe they have some kind of mind control power or something that can cause people to commit suicide.  Who knows?

So, in short, it was a fantastic movie.

It was really the sort of thing you would shoot with your friends.  Watch this one when you are in the mood and there are plenty of laughs.  It still doesn’t beat Vampires vs. Zombies as greatest bad movie of all time though.