My review was written in December 1987 after watching the feature on Vestron video cassette.
"Hard Rock Zombies", a pickup briefly released by Cannon in 1985, is a not-bad cult item combining rock music and horror spoofing. Picture was lensed in California in 1983 in tandem with "American Drive-In", with latter film economically using the "Zombies" feature as the film-within-the-film playing at the drive-in.
E. J Curcio plays the lead singer of a heavy metal band on tour, which gets mixed up with a Hiler cult after picking up a pretty blonde hitchhiker (Lisa Toothman a/k/a Donna Boise). The band is murdered, but fortunately Curcio was toying with some satanic lyrics taken from a book on raising the dead and, sure enough, the music is used to reanimate them as zombies.
Plot involves some silly run-ins with local types intent on banning rock music from their municipality, but catchy music and some effective satire, especially the zombies' rhythmic strutting, are the film's highlights. Horror buffs will note an inconsistency in pic's solutions to dealing with the problem of annihilating the undead and a silly sequence of good guys obtaining large blow-ups of celebrity posters (Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, etc.) to scare the zombies with is thoroughly unconvincing.
Pic would make an interesting college campus booking with "American Drive-In".