The campy horror movie Billy Bob Thornton wants to forget: “It’s not on the resumé”
Throughout the 1970s, a young Billy Bob Thornton followed the path of his first love: music. He was convinced he was going to become a rock star one day, so he played in several bands, including Tres Hombres, who specialised in ZZ Top covers. However, by the end of that decade, it became clear that music superstardom wasn’t in the cards for him. Realising this dream career was too unrealistic, he moved to Los Angeles and set his sights on something equally unrealistic: becoming an actor.
After a decade of trying to make his way in one part of show business, Thornton knew he was in for the long haul if he was to make acting a viable career. So, for most of the ’80s, he worked any day job that would have him, including stints as a waiter in a pizza parlour, a telemarketer, and an offshore wind farmer. For a long time, it looked like acting would pay off about as well for him as music, and he wound up in the hospital at one point with heart problems brought on by malnutrition. It turned out that subsisting entirely on potatoes, the only thing he could afford, wasn’t doing him any favours.
Finally, though, by the end of the ’80s, Thornton had made enough headway that he was making a living, of sorts, as an actor. “A meagre living as an actor, it has to be said,” he chuckled in 2012, “but I thought it best to stick with it.”
In this period, he was hired as a stand-in for the low-budget ’86 thriller Hunter’s Blood, and wound up appearing in two scenes as a character conveniently-named Billy Bob. A minor part in the ’88 drama South of Reno and Adam Sandler’s movie debut Going Overboard followed, as well as a couple of short TV gigs, before Thornton landed the role he later wished he could delete from history.
You see, when you become a famous actor with box office hits and Oscar nominations under your belt, it’s a little embarrassing when peers and fans find out your fourth movie credit came in something called Chopper Chicks in Zombietown. This “campy” grindhouse horror romp follows a group of badass biker gals who defend their hometown from the zombies used as workers in a radioactive mine by a local mad scientist, and Thornton had a minor role as Donny, the husband of one of the ass-kicking biker ladies.
Naturally, Thornton doesn’t talk about Chopper Chicks very often, but when Esquire interviewed him in 2013 and asked if he’d ever made an honest-to-goodness horror movie, he uncharacteristically shouted it out. “Not really,” the rumpled superstar mused. “I did a campy one in the early ’90s, called Chopper Chicks in Zombietown. It’s not on the resumé anymore; it was early in my career. It was about a bunch of zombies and female bikers.” However, when the Esquire interviewer exclaimed, “Clearly, I need to see this,” Thornton deadpanned, “You can look it up; you’ll get a kick out of it.”
Did this mean Thornton wasn’t as mortified by the movie as he had let on for so many years? OK, sure, he’d probably rather it was excised from his “Serious Hollywood A-lister” CV, but if he thinks people can get a kick out of it, he must recognise it has its own lurid, intentionally silly charms? Whatever the case, he didn’t have to speak about Chopper Chicks in hushed tones and wry asides for long, as only three years after its release, he wrote and starred in One False Move, which launched his career as a Hollywood mainstay.
