Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town is the typical Troma mix of light horror, adventure, and bad gags. I would think this film was thought up during a heady night of boozing in front of the video recorder. Films viewed being Easy Rider, The Magnificent Seven, Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!, and of course Night Of The Living Dead. However, the resultant film is no way in the same league as its 'inspirations'.
          The film is about a gang of leather clad female bikers who ride from town to town to escape the grind of everyday life and their diverse pasts. At the films beginning they are riding into the dusty, desert backwater of Zariah (population 128 (no sorry 127!)) in search of `meat' (both senses of the word are applicable). After the typical cliché of the frosty reception from the locals, the girls discover that Zariah has an alarmingly high mortality rate. Yes, a 'mad' scientist is at work bumping off the locals and raising them as zombies. Cue confrontation between the 'chicks' and the shambling undead.
          On a sidenote: The term chopper has three meanings. Here the usage is obviously as slang for a motorbike, but chopper also means axe and also has a phallic resonance. I think the filmmakers wasted the opportunity to make a film (the only film) about axe wielding dyke bikers. The resulting film being a sort of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert meets George A. Romero!
          Back to the review proper: 'Chopper Chicks' also has themes/moments similar to two much better zombie films namely Dead & Buried and The Plague Of Zombies. Using the undead as slave labour, here to work in a radiation contaminated mine (hey, it's a Troma movie - they have to get a radiation link in somewhere), is lifted straight from 'Plague'. I won't mention the Dead & Buried link as it would overtly spoil that film.
          Suffice to say I was not particularly impressed with 'Chopper Chicks'. For starters, the film fails to make the zombies threatening or frightening. Zombies work best in claustrophobic settings, when they pop up unexpectedly and when there are vast numbers of them. They are not much good ambling down a high street or along a desert road where they just become fodder for a baseball bat. Also, the evil protagonist did not have much of an impact, being reduced to the level of a fall guy for slapstick humour. There isn't even a confrontation between him and the biker women.
          But 'Chopper Chicks' is also a comedy-adventure so the horror aspect could take second place. Fair enough, but the film mostly fails here as well. Moments that I found amusing were as sparse as the desert setting. The characters too easily fall into the realms of crude caricature and the viewer ends up with more empathy for the cadavers. Any pretence of a veneer of female solidarity/empowerment in the film is quickly scraped away. The inclusion of a blind troupe of children adds nothing to the film. Here the potential for moments of both horror and comedy as the kiddies mingled with the undead was lost. Finally, too few of the humans die whilst the zombies are massacred. The only biker to die in battle does so stupidly, just becoming another plot mechanism for another explosion.
          Still 'Chopper Chicks' does have some redeeming features. The initial victim is a child - a welcome break from the typical rose-tinted treatment of children in most horror films. The use of a stapler to seal the zombies' mouths to stop them biting is inspired. As is the fact that the local townsfolk refuse to fight the zombies as they're 'family'. The best moment in the film is the reaction of one biker to a proclamation of love from an ex-boyfriend. Her response to the words `I love you' is superb, a cinematic classic.