April 22, 2009

They really didn’t need to do a lot to make Jenna Jameson look like a zombie, did they?

Jenna Jameson stars as one of the titular stripper zombies. She becomes zombified after being attacked mid-dance by an infected soldier with a weapons grade virus. Maybe weapons grade isn’t the right term – the virus was designed by the military to use on our own soldiers so they could keep on fighting after death. The virus is a little sensitive – it remains pure in females – Jenna is still able to strip and read Nietzsche after becoming a zombie. However, when passed through a male, the virus mutates and the zombies go berserk. Let me be clear – the literary stripper zombies still eat people, they just ramble on about existentialism after they do it.

Existentialism is an underlying theme in Zombie Strippers. Jenna quotes Nietzsche to the other strippers…poorly. The strip club is located in Sartre, Nebraska – how cute. There are also several very boring scenes of strippers having existentialist conversations on whether to become zombies or not. The scenes would actually be better satire without the existentialist overtones – an honest assessment of whether decay is worth stripping glory would have been much funnier.

I felt kind of gypped watching Zombie Strippers on SpikeTV. Notwithstanding the blurring of Jenna’s boobtacular appendages, I can only stand people calling each other “snothead” for so long. Speaking of blurry appendages – Jenna was the only one that got topless anyway, except the redhead with pasties, which wasn’t blurred anyway. How hard is it to find bimbos willing to go topless in a horror flick? What the fuck? At least they didn’t cut out the ping-pong ball/billiard ball scene. Zombie Jenna performs the same trick that Winona Ryder performed in this film…

Robert Englund is the only other well known star in Zombie Strippers – he’s carved out a nice little niche for himself, starring in B Horror Movies. (Now that he’s been replaced in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, what else is he going to do?) I liked his role here, as the germophobic strip club owner, better than the last one I saw him in, the cannibalistic patriarch in 2001 Maniacs. Maybe it’s because the Zombie Strippers get him in most unpleasant way I have EVER seen in a zombie flick – and I have seen a LOT of zombie flicks. I’m not going to ruin it for you, it must be experienced first hand. (I will say that I’m SO glad that this film wasn’t made in Smell-O-Vision.)

Yes, they definitely left it open for a sequel. Let’s see this zombie sex worker thing go in a different direction. How about Zombie Massage Parlor? “Every massage comes with a not-so-happy ending!” Or how about they take the virus to Amsterdam for Zombie Red Light District? Or keep it local with the Zombie Chicken Ranch? Damnit, Zombies + Chickens has already been done before!

 

Year – 2008
Rating – R
Runtime – 94 minutes
Genre – Horror
Director(s) – Jay Lee
Writer(s) – Jay Lee
Actor(s) – Jenna Jameson, Robert Englund, Roxy Saint, Penny Drake, Whitney Anderson
BOB Rating – Three BOBs
Favorite Quote – " Let's see if I got this straight - our best stripper is a reanimated corpse who is feeding off the living flesh of our customers, who in turn reanimate, even if they're just a fucking head? You don't see this as a problem?" - Ian (Robert Englund)