Pall Dancers

Zombie Strippers
2008
Dir. Jay Lee
I don’t have my copy of the Zombie Field Guide at hand at the moment, but I can’t recall a chapter detailing how zombism leads to extraordinary stripping ability in women. But alas and alack, that’s the plot of Zombie Strippers, an execrable waste of 90 minutes that could have worked if the writers didn’t think camp was an excuse for truly horrible writing.
Hell, I can pretty well imagine how the pitch for this barely polished turd went.
Jay Lee: What do fanboys love? Zombies! And Robert Englund. And b(.)(.)bs. And Jenna Jameson. And Jenna Jameson’s b(.)(.)bs.
Cigar chomping fatcat producer: Have a few mil to make a shitty movie.
*snorts line of blow off George Lucas’ ass before releasing Star Wars in theaters again with additional 15 frames of new footage filmed with James Cameron’s Avatar cameras*
The sad part is all of this could have worked. Instead we get this unwatchable coprolite that actually features worse acting than the films that powered Ms. Jameson’s original rise to prominence.
Zombie Strippers is the tale of a zombie outbreak at a sleazy strip club run by a pervy, germaphobic Freddy Kreuger that conveniently shares a common alleyway with a s00per s33kr1t military base where they’re doing research on a “chemovirus” to provide zombie soldiers for George Bush’s endless series of wars. Things, predictably, get out of hand.
Zombology: While the chemovirus turns men into drooling, flesh eating monsters, it turns women into drooling, fleshing eating monsters who can work a stripper pole the way Eddie van Halen works a fretboard. A woman in a white lab coat said it, so it must be true. The undead dancers become all the rage in town until they start munching down on the clientele post-lap dance. (Dammit people, you’ve been warned about the Champagne Room.) It does raise an interesting philosophical point: just how putrid does a zombie woman have to be before some guy will find her un-hittable?

What Robert Englund is doing in this film, I can’t fathom. His turn as a strip club owner makes you long for his more subtle and nuanced performance from the later Nightmare on Elm Street films (aka "funny" Freddy). But what’s most maddening about Zombie Strippers is the wildly inconsistent effects throughout. The zombie makeup and a few the set pieces – including a pair of head ripping scenes – are well done, but then it shovels on truly awful CGI. Like early Sega Genesis seen from the rear view mirror of a PS3 bad. That just compounds all of the other problems: casting, script, direction (or the suspicious absense of all three).
As much as I really wanted to score this piece of shit a 1(.)(.)on the Hell of the Living Dead scale of craptacularity just for giggles, I have to admit that some of the effects shots are smile-inducing and the zombie makeup is fairly decent for the budget. Grading the suck on a curve, Zombie Strippers bumps and grinds its way to an 85 instead.