Zombie Strippers

(2008) **

You know those B movies that promise so much in their title, only to then fail to deliver the goods? This isn’t one of those movies. There’s plenty of gore and boobs here--maybe slightly more gore than boobs, for those scoring at home, and why wouldn’t you be? The headliners in this one are Robert Englund (not one of the strippers, in a brilliant bit of casting) and Jenna Jameson, and yeah, Jenna leads the crew of fleshpots who in turn develop a taste for flesh. The twist in this one is that the particular zombie virus makes women more confident and intelligent (at least sometimes), while it turns idiot guys into even bigger idiots—pretty much standard zombies from Romero onwards.

The movie starts out pretty dismally, with a really cheapo “news broadcast” frame story that pretty much any high schooler could top with an iphone vid camera and an hour downloading clips from the web. The gag is that Bush is still president (Jenna Bush is on the Surpreme Court and has reinstated him or something). So to help fight all of Bush’s ongoing wars, the government comes up with a virus to reanimate dead soldiers—what could go wrong, right?

Right after the mailed in opening, though, there’s actually a pretty decently staged zombie hunt sequence with an elite marine group going through the government labs with laser sights and shit. Ok, I might have been overly impressed by the lasers. I think there was a fog machine at work, too. Of course one marine gets infected and runs away when he sees how such people are dealt with, and he naturally stumbles into an illegal strip club (it’s never quite clear what’s so illegal about the place) where he snacks on Jenna and all kinds of hijinks ensue.

The plot goes on pretty much as you’d expect from there, so I’m not going to bother with any of it, but there are two elements of this one that are worth noting. The director throughout tries to play the movie off as anti-Bush satire. This doesn’t work very well, as it all seems pretty low hanging fruit and way dated. Plus the Bush jokes are unfunny, and the anti-war subtext just comes off as lame. At the same time, the director for some reason also wanted to use the movie to parody/pay homage to famous thinkers in Western philosophy. So there’s all sorts of shout outs to Nietzsche, Descartes, Sartre, and Ionesco, among others, I’m sure. Most of the time, this just seems weird and very undergraduate half-baked film project type shit. But a couple of times, the strippers do nail a line, and for whatever reason it worked for me—“What’s happening out there isn’t about the ‘self’—that’s just regression to the mean.” By worked for me, I mean it made me chuckle--there's no actual philosophy being examined here.

In some of the crappier actors’ hands, though, the philosophy one liners break down into just nonsense existential silliness—or at least what I imagine B movie directors think existential silliness sounds like.

Ultimately, this isn’t really one to seek out, but it’s diverting enough. It’s certainly not the worst movie I’ve seen this year. Date Night, I’m looking at you. Actually, hell, this is better cinema than either of Ricky Gervais’ last two movies. How is that possible?