The 80’s were a time of big hair and even bigger music, roaring guitar, pounding synth, and even larger hair. Vinegar Syndrome brings two of the 80’s most wild and loud music centric horror joints in a double feature Blu-Ray package sourced from brand spanking new scans.

First up is HARD ROCK ZOMBIES, a completely insane fever dream of a movie, I can’t stress how much this movie goes off the reservation. A “heavy metal” band is invited to play a small conservative town where they are swiftly murdered, and resurrected as the undead on a path of vengeance and revenge. I really don’t want to get more into the plot here because this is a movie that really needs to be experienced with as little knowledge as possible. Director Krishna Shah originally only intended to shoot bits of this film as a “movie in a movie” for another film and it ballooned into a feature film, and it truly feels like it in the best way. This says something about the film that in my opinion this is the most wild and insane thing to sport the Cannon Films logo in front of it. There’s also a charm to its haggard DIY existence, it’s weird off kilter sense of humor and weird blasts of arthouse nonsense. This movie deserves the cult resurgence something like a DANGEROUS MEN or MIAMI CONNECTION has.

Vinegar Syndrome present HARD ROCK ZOMBIES here in a hybrid scan, a 2K scan of the R rated cut from Cannon Films and tape sourced inserts of gore cut from the film. This is the best this movie has ever and probably ever will look. This was an incredibly low budget production and that they even got the theatrical cut footage to look as decent as it does is a testament to the hard work VS do. This was a grungy production and it absolutely shows, but the blu looks great. Sound is in 2.0 DTS-HD MA and for what it is, it’s perfectly clear, music sounds forceful and good, the audio quality takes a dive on the video sourced footage but that’s to be expected but it’s not anything really bad.

This disc is positively stacked as far as bonus features go, there is HARD ROCK ZOMBIES NEVER SAY DIE, an hour long making of doc with cast and crew interviews from inception to release of the film, lots of good stories on the making of the film. POPCORN FARTS AND LOW BUDGET CHEESE has FX men Everett Burell and Chris Briggs talking about the work they did on the film, and the challenges of doing a run and gun low budget zombie movie like this. FROM BIT PLAYER TO BAND LEADER is an interview with Susette Boggs and who talks about her time on the film and time in the music business. The final feature on the disc is THE BIBLE OF HOLY MOSES, an appreciation piece by Lucy Hall who is writing a book on rock films and she is quite a big fan of the film.

The second film in this set came later in the decade and doesn’t have much in the way of on-screen music but that doesn’t matter when the movie itself is such a fun ride. SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROCK is the story of Alex, a college student dealing with increasingly awful nightmares, which leads him and his friends to Alcatraz Island where they battle an ancient demonic entity who’s been plaguing his dreams. Highly, highly derivative of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROCK is an incredibly fun movie of the bygone era of weekend VHS rentals and pizza boxes, where you’d grab anything on the shelf with a cool illustrated VHS box. I have to say that the movie kicks into another gear of entertaining when Tony Basil enters the film as a sort of spirit guide for Alex to help him to defeat the evil. She is easily the MVP of the film, second only to composer Mark Mothersbaugh, who with his band Devo composed the music for the film, which besides the FX work I would say is the best feature of this film. Overall, this movie doesn’t reinvent the wheel at all but for a turn your brain off late 80’s horror film, it’s a good time.

Vinegar Syndrome here have done a new 4K scan of SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROCK from the original 35mm camera negative and the results here are fantastic to my eyes. This is a dark, hazy movie, and the colors never are not popping, detail always stays strong, skin tones look natural, and the bright neon’s pop really hard. I have not seen the previous Code Red release to compare, but I can’t imagine it looking nicer than this. The 2.0 DTS-HD MA sound mix is great, dialogue is never muffled and the Devo score shines through the entire runtime.

The previous Code Red release had a Mark Mothersbaugh interview that is not included here, so if you’re a completionist hang on to that disc, but there is a bundle of interviews with cast and crew included with this release that give a nice insight into the production. The films theatrical trailer is also included.

Vinegar Syndrome have given horror fans a great bundle with this release, fantastic AV presentation as well as nice special features that go into the making of each respective film, I can’t recommend this blu enough.

-Billy Jarrett