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By EdwardHavens
April 17th, 2008
"Zombie Strippers" is the film "Planet Terror" should have been. A true grindhouse experience, with a limited cast and budget, and a finite amount of locations to shoot in, requiring a few extra minutes of prep to think of ways to get the things the director wants to do without spending more than a couple bucks doing it.
It's as close as we're likely to get to that last great vestiges of grindhouse cinema anytime in the future.
Seriously. When one goes to a film called "Zombie Strippers," one expecting anything more than a Grade-Z cheesefest is simply out of touch with what these types of films are supposed to be. Even if debut feature director Jay Lee tries to go highbrow and claim it's all an adaptation of Eugene Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" (a ruse he takes so far as to name the strip club Rhino and the major male character Ian Essko), all the target audience wants to know is whether it's got lots of blood and lots of naked girls, to which the answers are a resounding "Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes!"
One-time porn star Jenna Jameson, trying to go semi-legitimate, stars as Kat, the Nietzsche-absorbing part of a cotillion of strippers at an underground strip club. Why an underground strip club? Because, apparently, you need to do that kind of thing when you're in a small town in Nebraska. If you really must know the "plot"... a test zombie from a secret government lab escapes the confines of the army base where the military is testing an experimental virus, finding refuge in the aforementioned hidden strip club. The zombie bites Kat while she performs, which soon turns her into some kind of maniac on the pole, dancing like she's never danced before. The tips fly like never before, and soon the other strippers at Rhino's need to decide whether they want to become a zombie stripper or remain human.
Robert Englund appears as Essko, the owner of the club, who sees nothing but green in all that oozing blood. Englund's character is supposed to be a real dirtbag, but without the gruesome Freddy Kruger makeup and menacing ADR-altered voice which made him a horror icon, Essko comes off as little more than a minor distraction. Sure, he might get his comeuppance in spectacular fashion, but every time he's on screen, it's a frivolous diversion. We don't want cutesy political commentary. We don't want minor in-jokes concerning stereotypes and old movies. We want blood and we want boobs! And we get both. Outside of the blonde Jameson and her well-crafted breasticles, there are brunettes with large breasts, blondes with petite breasts, a redhead with decent breasts and even a tattooed Goth girl with pierced breasts. (Apparently, there are no strippers of the non-Caucasian persuasion in Nebraska.)
If "Zombie Strippers" had been made in the 1960s, it probably would have been released through Roger Corman's American International Pictures and shared the bill with "The Pit and the Pendulum" or "The Last Man on Earth." Had it come out in the 1980s, chances are it would have found a home at Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz's Troma Entertainment, seen at dollar houses alongside "The Toxic Avenger" or "Surf Nazis Must Die." Ironically, "Zombie Strippers" is being released in this day and age by Triumph Films, which originally began in the early 1980s as a joint venture between Columbia Pictures and the French company Gaumont to distribute the latter's stable of European films in the US (the original logo for Triumph had the Columbia Pictures' lady logo nestled snuggly within L'Arc de Triomphe) and is now the lower-end genre label for one of the world's largest creators of entertainment content, which can conveniently be viewed upon a myriad of their own consumer electronic hardware. It's just another sign how much the entertainment industry has changed over the years.
And when you really think about it, it's amazing that, with the explosion of direct-to-video titles in the 1980s and 1990s, there never was a movie titled "Zombie Strippers" until now. How did a concept so brilliantly simple not get made before? It's high-concept at it's most base. You don't need to compare it to anything else to sell it. It's not "Speed" in a taxi or "Die Hard" in a mall. It's zombie strippers. You mind don't need any additional information.
On a technical level, it's fairly obvious "Zombie Strippers" was shot on a medium-grade consumer digital video camera with some post work done to make the blowup to 35mm look presentable. The lighting is unimaginative and the camera movement fairly iniquitous. What passes for a music soundtrack is a lumbering mess of low-rent industrial and metal. The acting wouldn't pass muster on a telenovela. And the direction is clearly by a first-time director with little-to-no previous experience. Yet confound it all, I love it though. A film called "Zombie Strippers" would never be considered in the same light one would judge a Billy Wilder movie. You compare it to "Street Trash" and other trash cinema. And for what it is, "Zombie Strippers" gives the viewer exactly what they were looking for.
My rating: B-