ZOMBIE STRIPPERS! Well, the classic exploitation-style title pretty much sums it up. All the film itself that follows that opening title has to do is maintain the momentum of the premise for the running time, delighting, baffling, and generally spoofing a genre that is itself a parody of sorts. This opus by Jay Lee starts by seeming to fulfill the promise of the premise, but, alas, it doesn’t stay sharp enough to carry through to the end, relying on the inherent silliness of the concept to do the work needed by the sort of sharp writing that is mostly AWOL here. It’s not enough to have the zany canniness of the situations when the energy level is decidedly inert, even as rival zombie strippers duel to the undeath.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It begins so well. It’s 2012, the year the Maya calendar predicts will be our last and George Bush has just been elected to a fourth term, so maybe those pre-Columbians were on to something. The Saudis have officially purchased the White House and Brangelina have adopted Ethiopia. What with the Gulf War having lasted this long and spread to France and Alaska, troops are, understandably, in short supply. The W Corporation (owned by guess who and his VP?) develops a solution in the form of a virus that can reanimate dead tissue and kick-start brain function. The catch is, and there has to be one in a story like this, that it only really works on soldiers, those with a take-no-prisoners attitude, and it breaks down when transmitted by the male members of the species. Of course is gets out. Of course it finds its way into The Rhino Club, an illegal and suitably sleazy strip joint in the momentously monikered town of Sartre, Nebraska, and of course the strippers have the proper take-no-prisoners attitude while dancing to make the being dead thing work for them. It also works for the audience, who lap up the wild abandon with which the dead dance to the point where a living gal just doesn’t stand a chance, even when she flings her panties into the bored crowd. It works even better for the club’s owner, the germ-phobic Ian Essko (yes, it’s a reference to a playwright), who is raking in the dough now that his girls no longer breathe, though he still spritzes the air around them with disinfectant just in case there’s a herpes virus still clinging to its dead host.
The idea of exploiting clichés with ironic excess is not new, and when well done, it packs its own exhilarating payback. That edge is just not here. Sure, there’s the uber-efficient and elite military squad who doesn’t bat a collective eye at dealing with zombies, even though the buxom blonde member does lose her tank top in the course of battle on a regular basis. Sure, there’s the pure young thing who is only taking to the Rhino’s stage in order to pay for her grandmother’s operation. And sure there is the preening stripper queen, Kat (porn star Jenna Jameson who, wisely, is asked to do little but pole dance, living and dead), who snarls her way through her act and her relationships and then reads Nietzsche between bouts of both. The dialogue is rife with deontological constructs and deconstructs as characters that veer off into philosophical debates about the purpose of life and the meaning of intention but even that promising element is undermined because Lee refuses to settle on one tone to play throughout. The result is Englund and Carmit Levite as Mme Blavastki, the wacky Russian ex-stripper who plays den mother to the girls at The Rhino, are both and by themselves in a broad farce. Everyone else, however, is in a black comedy, that is plenty dark but not quite funny enough, even when Kat uses billiard balls in a way that nature never intended in order to take down her rival.
Lee does touch on the whole muddle of sex and death that are hard-wired into the human psyche with a hollering crowd throwing money and lust at the decomposing but still buff bodies of the strippers. There is the piquant juxtaposition of the bounty of surgically enhanced secondary sexual characteristics not quite bobbing on the Rhino’s stage and the more straight-forward body-ripping gore in which the enhanced zombies indulge. Yet, for all that, his meditation on what beauty means, the need for conformity that overrides all other considerations, and why there are no eels to help dispose of body parts are not explored adequately, never mind to their respective fullest.
ZOMBIE STRIPPERS ends up being a bumpy ride through the conceit of schlock and the pretension of horror flicks to encapsulate the human condition by taking its struggles to illogical extremes.
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