A lesbian, biker girls, zombies, dwarfs, blind kids, a mad scientist and some small town hicks make up the cast of Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town. It’s a recipe for offense and disgust from everyone’s favourite b-movie studio: Troma. It even has that delicious b-movie treat, a small role for someone who would later become an a-list celeb. In this instance it’s Jolie-shagging archetypal redneck Billy Bob Thornton who makes an appearance.

The chopper chicks in question are an all-female biker gang named ‘Cycle Sluts’. It’s not the most subtle of monikers for their ragtag group but it’s reasonably accurate insofar as they ride motorcycles and revel in their promiscuity. Led by a bitch-from-hell lesbian stereotype they apparently travel the highways of the USA looking for trouble, sex, booze or ideally a combination of all three. The story opens with their arrival in a town so small and fictional I can’t actually recall the name. Sufficed to say they soon encounter the promised zombies that were created by a mad scientist to mine for uranium under the town. After getting past the requisite “we don’t take kindly to your kind of people round here” routine, we get some zombie killing and a trite reconciliation with the town that initially spurned the Cycle Sluts.

This brings me neatly to the central flaw with Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town. Perhaps in tribute to it’s lesbian protagonist, there’s an awful lot of foreplay and heavy petting before we actually get to the zombie killing action. CCIZT spent plenty of time going down on me, I’m easily pleased when there’s a reasonably well acted mad scientist and a gun-toting little person on screen. However sometimes that’s just not enough, when there’s the word ‘zombie’ in a film’s title I expect the undead to make an appearance frequently and spectacularly.

I don’t mean to be too harsh on the film, it ticks plenty of the zombie boxes. They aren’t the result of a plague or curse in this case but a reason is still found for decapitation to be required. It’s just that the drawn out introduction filled with tedious exposition really puts a downer on at least the first third of the film. At one point, a character’s posession of an Uzi is introduced and explained in such a ham fisted way that to say it wrecked my suspension of disbelief would be an understatement. It all smacks of a writer who couldn’t come up with enough ways to combine biker chicks and zombies so instead they just spent half an hour detailing the origins of the biker chicks.

Part of the appeal of b-movies is that they aren’t really about the characters, they’re about the ridiculous situations that a mainstream audience just wouldn’t appreciate. Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town has a habit of forgetting what it is. It tries to make its two-dimensional characters into sympathetic heroines when it should be turning them into preposterous charicatures. There’s probably enough silliness for me to recommend giving it a watch if it turns up on an obscure tv channel late at night. However it’s far from being a prime example of the genre. Perhaps if you’re some kind of Troma completist it could be worth hunting down but otherwise, give this one a miss and watch a real zombie film. Or perhaps some lesbian porn.