Before you start saying anything, I know exactly what you’re thinking–I’m actually reviewing a movie called Zombie Strippers? Well, come on, with a name that evocative, who wouldn’t want to see Zombie Strippers? Wait–don’t answer that just yet. Not since Snakes on a Plane has a (mainstream) film had a title so straightforward that you know exactly what you’re going to get before you even step into the theater. Where Strippers departs from Snakes, though, is that it’s actually Grade A B-movie schlock, whereas Snakes was just pretending to be. In this respect, it actually has more in common with the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double-bill Grindhouse–with probably about one-tenth the budget.
With that said, this review is indeed safe for work. I promise. The movie? Totally not safe for work.
Strewn with some surprisingly decent effects, this unevenly paced film delivers, if nothing else, on the promise of its title: lots of surgically enhanced nude dead women strutting their stuff. This is both slightly titillating and extremely creepy at the same time.
The plot, or what is close enough to being called that, goes a little bit like this: W Enterprises (headed by you-know-who, and if you don’t, just use The Google) has developed a way to reanimate dead flesh, ostensibly so the military’s supply of soldiers will be never-ending. Of course, something goes terribly wrong, and the infection spreads from the secret lab where it was being developed to a nearby illegal strip club. Why is it illegal? Who knows? Who cares? What does matter is that strippers, led by Kat (Jenna Jameson, branching out from straight-up porn), get bitten and turn into zombies, and that, naturally, they become better and more popular strippers once they become zombies. The fact that patrons of the club keep disappearing when the girls take them in the back for lap dances doesn’t bother them one bit.
Heaps of blood, gore and nudity follow. Though not nearly as clever as it aims to be, the film at least tries. In addition to drawing inspiration from Eugène Ionesco’s ever-relevant absurdist play Rhinoceros, it’s full of jabs at the Bush administration and philosophy references–for starters, Jenna Jameson, as the first stripper to succumb to zombification, reads and quotes Nietzsche.
Ultimately, though, all intellectual touches remain secondary to the cat fights and carnage of Ms. Jameson and her leggy colleagues, clearly the main attraction here. None of the acting is great–veteran horror actor Robert Englund (Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street) is most egregious in this respect, hamming it up mercilessly as the owner of the strip club.
This is intentional “B” movie heaven with absolutely no apologies from the filmmakers. Stay away if you can’t stomach the bloody entrails of the zombie world, the casual nudity of strippers, stiff acting and laughably bad narrative structure. On the other hand, do come if you want to have a hysterically good time because this film is also anarchistic, symbolically multi-layered and best of all everyone doesn’t care who they irritate.
Zombie Strippers was shot on video so the gore glistens as brightly as the neon signs glow, and the production design is as witty as the dialogue. Everything in this movie seems to have been thoroughly worked out. It’s just paced for traffic jams. Zombie Strippers is engorged with so many ideas, and so much pole dancing, that the whole thing capsizes under the weight of its glee. Is it good? Is it bad? Honestly, that’s not really something that I can judge. It is what it is. The film’s joke about female enhancement stays afloat, though. Zombification has no apparent effect on implants. Skin and teeth decay. Fake breasts are forever.