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It’s doubtful that 2008 and will be remembered as “the year of the zombies in strip club films”, but it is sort of odd that we’ve had not one but two films exploring that very premise this year (in much the same way we had Volcano and Dante’s Peak back in 1997…). Unfortunately for fans of the burgeoning “walking dead eat the patrons of the champagne room” subgenre, neither Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (the other zombie stripper film) nor Zombie Strippers manages to become the classic of this particular cinematic movement.

This is odd because you wouldn’t figure it would be all that difficult to pull off a zombies in the strip club type of film. You’d need some girls with no inhibitions about onscreen nudity, some guys to be zombies, a decent FX team, and a script that would only be required to find the right balance between nudity and gore. Zombie Strippers manages to get two of these things right, but it misses out on the most vital of the components-the script. Writer/director Jay Lee seems to have bitten off more than he can chew here, turning in a screenplay that is so schizophrenic that the audience is never sure what to make of the film onscreen.

For a zombie stripper film to genuinely work, it needs to strike a balance between gore and nudity-but Zombie Strippers never really manages to find the middle ground. Rather than being a zombie flick set in a strip club, most of the film feels like a softcore stripper movie wherein half of the women are undead. With actresses like Jenna Jameson, Roxy Saint, Shamron Moore, and Whitney Anderson around, I can understand wanting to play up the whole “naked dancing” part of the equation-but the film spends far more time forcing us to watch the girls dance (first as normal strippers, then as the titular “zombie strippers”) than is really necessary. I like naked women as much as anyone, but I was hoping to see some more zombie action.

This balance issue isn’t the only problem in the script, either. The other glaring shortcoming is that Lee apparently wanted to make a clever B movie. I have nothing against that aspiration-but he’s generally fallen well short of the mark. Zombie Strippers is infused with little jokes about existentialist philosophy (the town is named Sartre, Jameson’s Kat character is reading Nietzsche, and there’s a character named Camus-and that’s just for starters) that at least half of the audience isn’t likely to get (and no, I’m not being condescending to my fellow horror fans-they’re just fairly obtuse references). Then, Lee mixes in some political commentary (Bush is in his fourth term as president) that’s both ham-fisted and will make this film feel dated by January of 2009. Social commentary and intelligent humor can work in zombie films-we’ve seen countless examples of it from Night of the Living Dead on through to Shaun of the Dead. It doesn’t even have to be subtle-but it does have to be funny and something the target audience actually understands. I’m not convinced that Zombie Strippers hits the mark on either of those points.

I’m not even going to get into the whole “why do guys find the strippers hotter when they’re clearly dead, decaying, and missing appendages” part of the story. I don’t think there’s any real explanation for why that occurs, other than it fit in nicely with the idea of the screenplay focusing on zombie strippers.

Despite these problems, the experience isn’t all bad. Robert Englund plays the sleazy strip club owner with his usual manic over-the-top theatrics (check the film for bite marks because he didn’t just chew the scenery, he gnawed it to ribbons). This performance isn’t as fun as his recent turn in Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, but Englund brings some genre credibility to a film that was banking primarily on Jameson’s appearance to bolster interest.

Speaking of Jameson, she acquits herself quite well. Her character, Kat, doesn’t have much to do (other than dance naked and eat the occasional person), but she’s a far better actresses than most adult film starlets. She could certainly be another Traci Lords, carving out a mainstream career after a life in porn, if she chooses.

The rest of the cast is about what you’d expect-most of the women have been chosen for their roles based on their physical attributes as much as their acting ability. That’s okay with me because most of them have very little to do beside their various dancing scenes anyway. I’d rather see a hot girl who with marginal acting ability play a stripper than some master thespian like Jody Foster. I should mention Joey Medina, too-he’s one of the film’s other bright spots, playing a totally clichéd Mexican janitor. I found myself wishing his character had gotten more screen time.

So, you’ve probably already guessed that the film delivers on the nudity promised in the title-but what about the gore? Zombie Strippers may need more zombie action overall, but when it does get around to spilling blood, it spills it copiously. The FX work, like the script, veers all over the place but generally manages to stay on the positive side of the ledger. The CGI effects look like computer generated imagery, but Zombie Strippers manages to work in more than a few sequences using more traditional FX work. The zombie make-up is also good, managing to make the girls look undead, but not so undead that they totally lose their physical allure. I wouldn’t call Zombie Strippers a gore film, but it does have its fair share of gruesome delights.

Zombie Strippers is not a film without problems-in fact, I’ve spent most of this review highlighting all the ways it managed to fall short of my expectations. The script is too ambitious (and not funny enough) for its own good, but I get the feeling that writer/director Jay Lee had his heart in the right place. That’s one of the dangers of writing and directing-there’s no second collaborative voice there to question your decisions and offer alternative ideas. One person is essentially calling all the shots and when you’ve worked on something for as long as it takes to write a script, you’re often not very objective by the time you start filming. That being said, it’s not an awful film-it does have some jokes that work (Englund and Medina get all the good lines) and it offers up more nudity than the average Friday night on Cinemax (with some solid splatter work to complement it). This is not the definitive zombie/strippers film we’ve all been waiting for (okay, maybe not all of us…) but it’s a decent enough way to kill a few hours on a rainy day.

Horror Geek Rating: 3 out of 5

Tags: Film Reviews, Jenna Jameson, Joey Medina, Robert Englund, zombie movies, Zombie Strippers, zombies

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.