Zombie Strippers! (2008)

Waste of time

Great Film overall

Fantastic!

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

It was so badly lit. It didn't even look like a film. The CGI effects were cheap. Dull sound with bad music and no involvement. Only saving grace is clean dialogue. It was trying to be bad and it succeeded but not in the way that they wanted. At least Evil Bong (2006) was at least trying to be good even though it was bad. Do not watch, just trust me, don't waste your time.

Indulge me for a moment, please, as I quote myself from an old review: "It can be a tricky balancing act, coming up with the perfect film in the genre known as the horror comedy; a picture that is hilariously funny while at the same time being truly scary. And while there is no shortage of films with a decidedly uneven ratio of horror::comedy--such as 1960's 'The Little Shop of Horrors,' 1974's 'Young Frankenstein' and 1975's 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show'--such films usually come off as pure comedies, only with a horror setting. But when the balance is just right, such as in 'The Ghost Breakers' (1940), 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein' (1948, and still probably the finest exemplar of the horror comedy ever made) and 'Spider Baby' (1964), the result can be a timeless and wonderful entertainment." I wrote those words in my review of the 2002 cult item "Bubba Ho-Tep," which succeeded wildly as both horror and comedy, I felt. Well, now I must report that, to my great surprise, I have discovered yet another picture that manages that tricky balancing act: Jay Lee's "Zombie Strippers" (2008), which is not only laugh-out-loud funny, as might have been expected, but also features more gross-out, gut-munching, head-bursting zombie carnage than the last three George A. Romero movies combined!In the film's hilarious opening, a ridiculously gung-ho Marine team, the Z Squad (clearly patterned after the tough-as-nails crew in the sci-fi epic "Aliens"), is called in to quell a zombie revolt at a government lab, where the living dead were being developed to act as the supersoldiers of the future. The zombies are effectively slaughtered in a gonzo bloodbath, but one of the Marines, Byrdflough (!), gets bitten and infected during the battle. Fearful of being preemptively shot by one of his team members, Byrdflough escapes the scene and hides out in the local Rhino Club, which is run by a character named Ian Essko, and played by none other than Freddy Krueger portrayer himself, Robert Englund. (Literate viewers may recall that French playwright Eugene Ionesco came out with a play in 1959 called "Rhinoceros"; just one of the many literate in-jokes scattered throughout the film.) Before long, Byrdflough turns into a zombie himself, and attacks and kills the club's head stripper, Kat (played with zest by "The Queen of Porn," Jenna Jameson). But Kat doesn't stay dead for long, and her abilities as a pole dancer are only enhanced by her zombified state, resulting in her enormous popularity with the male buffoons in the audience! And soon, all the other jealous ecdysiasts are desirous of becoming zombies, too. Ian's new zombie strippers are raking in major bucks for the club, before long, but there IS a problem: All the male customers who the gals infect have in turn become zombies themselves, and have been locked away in the Rhino's basement. And that basement is reaching the point of maximum capacity....All the gore hounds out there who may be thinking that this silly-sounding movie won't deliver the requisite zombie mayhem might be in for a big surprise as "Zombie Strippers" proceeds. The FX in the film are terrifically impressive, the makeup work all that could be desired, the blood and guts worthy of approbation by Tom Savini. Just watch as Lilith, the Goth stripper, splits a guy's head open to eat his tongue, or how Madame Blavatski (the hilarious Russian in charge of the strippers, and named, of course, for whatever reason, after the notorious Russian occultist of the 19th century, Madame Helena Blavatsky), after being zombified, has her body blown apart, bit by bit, by machine gun fire. And you won't believe what a zombie can do in regard to a pole dance...simply eye boggling! The film, as mentioned, is also wildly funny, with many hilarious lines; the references to this viewer's all-time favorite movie, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," as well as to the cult fave "The Warriors," almost made me fall off the couch with laughter. Other hilarious bits: the newscast that opens the film, detailing George W.'s fourth term as president (yikes!), and the scene in which Ian's assistant, the Mexican Paco, looks at a photo of his wife and two daughters, before going off to fight the undead, and tearfully says, "Adios, Maria, Maria, Maria...." And just get a load of what zombie Kat is able to do with a bunch of pool balls (decency prevents me from saying)! As for Englund, he gives a fine comedic performance here, and his obnoxious, germaphobic character (he is constantly spraying disinfectant on the girls, and saying things like "You walking herpe") is a genuine inducer of big laffs. Of course, the film features fairly copious amounts of nudity, and many breasts are on display...some of them even natural. (Certainly not Jenna's, though; no two breasts could ever be that perfectly matched and symmetrical!) The picture is also a lot smarter than it needs to be, with numerous philosophical references (Kat, hilariously, is shown reading a book by Nietzsche, which she cannot understand until after she becomes a zombie; the film transpires in Sartre, Nebraska; and several of the strippers indulge in fairly deep existential discussions), a recomplicated plot finale, and timely and clever put-downs of the Bush administration (granted, a fairly broad target for satire). The film is surely not in the same great league as "Bubba Ho-Tep" or the other wonderful classics mentioned up top, but it still manages to succeed as both horror and comedy, for which the picture has my grudging respect. Who would have ever thought that a film featuring zombie face dancing could be so good?

I loved this movie. This came out on DVD just as I finished reading the play 'Rhinoceros' for a class. Let me tell you, this is not "supposedly" or "allegedly" based on this play, it is FOR SURE based on this play, and it has to be one of the most bad-ass adaptations I ever did see. It is indisputable that Jay Lee (writer, director) knew what he was doing when he adapted the smart and absurd play about Nazism taking over French townspeople like a flu, and that's part of what makes this movie so great! There are layers of social commentary in this movie and maybe they are not as poignant as they were in Europe 50 years ago, but nobody was shooting golf balls out of vagina's back then so it all works out. When I brought this up to my class (how could I not share this gem of a coincidence?), it raised some eyebrows and lowbrow laughs and then a week later this guy a couple seats away attested to it even stronger than I did. THE POINT OF THIS REVIEW IS TO GET YOU TO READ 'RHINOCEROS' BY EUGENE IONESCO (it's only like 90 pages) AND THEN WATCH 'ZOMBIE STRIPPERS!' AGAIN!. IT WILL SHED A WHOLE NEW MEANINGFUL LIGHT ONTO THIS INSANELY FUNNY AND (despite that all I've been saying is that this is an adaptation of something else) ORIGINAL MOVIE.

This movie is just horrendous. Now, I know what you're thinking. When you rent a film featuring porn star Jenna Jameson and titled Zombie Strippers!…how good can you really expect it to be? Well, I never really expected this thing to be any good. I had hoped that it might be one of those "so bad, it's good" movies. Instead, it overshoots "so bad, it's good" and lands in "so bad, it's really, really, really bad".The story, which is filled with lame jokes and wrapped up in some juvenile political satire at the expense of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, starts with a squad of soldiers sent to put down a zombie outbreak at a research lab. A virus was created to reanimate corpses so they could be used to fight in war. One of the soldiers gets bitten and runs away to an illegal strip club, where he bites the lead dancer (Jenna Jameson). She becomes a zombie, which in addition to filling her with the hunger for human flesh, also makes her a much better stripper.She bites a couple of other strippers and these undead skanks become a sensation, driving degenerate strip club patrons into such a frenzy they don't even care when a living girl gets naked on stage. That provokes jealousy and horror in some of the other strippers. However, the strip club owner (Robert Englund) just enjoys all the money he's making, though his plan to keep the strippers' zombified victims locked up in the basement turns out to be more trouble than all the money in the world. They get loose, chaos breaks out, including a zombie strip-off and an undead vagina being used in a way that I can't quite figure out how to describe.In fairness, Zombie Strippers is trying to be an over-the-top comedy. But there's an enormous emphasis on the word "trying" in that sentence. The jokes are putrid and this crew of alleged actors has all the comedic timing of a broken metronome that's sticking out of the burst stomach of a dead pig that's been left under the hot sun all day. I've seen Holocaust movies that were funnier than this film.This is another example of actors who can't act and a writer/director who can neither write nor direct. This bunch of losers thinks they can get around that by being intentionally awful. The whole charm of that sort of film, though, is that it's an honest and spectacularly failed attempt at making a good movie. Setting out to make a hilariously bad film is like intentionally becoming the world's fattest man. The end result is never pretty to look at.If you're one of the three people on Earth who hasn't already seen Jenna Jameson naked, you can find it in Zombie Strippers. Be forewarned; only two other actress get nude in this thing and only one of them is attractive. There is lots and lots of blood and gore and you can see Robert Englund embarrass himself with humor too corny for even the worst Nightmare on Elm Street sequel.If you took some of Jenna Jameson's XXX films and edited out the graphic sex, you'd probably end up with movies that were still better than Zombie Strippers. Don't even bother with this DVD.