Movie Review - Zombie Strippers

I went back to the doctor Saturday, and found out that there are two kinds of pneumonia. One kind is the normal kind, the kind where you get a shot in your ass and take some antibiotics and get better. The other kind is where you get more shots in your ass and take more antibiotics and maybe get better, but not for a couple weeks. Turns out, I had the second kind. So instead of playing games this weekend, I slept for about 30 hours. Then I woke up and watched Zombie Strippers on OnDemand. I really should have kept sleeping.

I should have known I would hate this movie, but there were so many upsides. Zombies are awesome. I love zombie movies and zombie games and zombie stories. Also, I love strippers, and this movie stars Jenna Jameson, who is a very accomplished actress in her chosen field (some actresses excel at art-house movies, or period pieces, or romantic comedy. Jenna Jameson is really great at porn). But if you think about it, 'zombie' and 'stripper' are not two things that go well together. Like, you might be really into holistic medicine, and you might really love bass fishing, but that doesn't mean you're going to like a fish hook high colonic.

The plot of the movie is incredibly absurd, as you might expect from a film called 'Zombie Strippers' that stars a big-name porn starlet. A government experiment goes awry, and an infected guy gets away from the testing institute. He runs a couple blocks and gets to the illegal strip club up the street. Because if you're going to run a massively classified government experiment on reanimated soldiers, it only makes sense that you do it close to an adult entertainment venue.

The zombie bites one of the strippers, and she dies, and then she is also a zombie. This is, traditionally, how zombies work. What's new here is that apparently, when a hot-body dame is zombified, she comes back as a really good stripper. The guys go nuts, throwing huge wads of cash at the zombie stripper, and so other strippers decide that being zombies would help make them money and also become zombies. Everything would probably work out great, except that private dances with these particular strippers generally end in unfortunate bloodshed (except that the guys are probably douchebags anyway, so it might not be that unfortunate). Also, the strippers are rotting.

There are so many things wrong with Zombie Strippers, but many of them I completely expected. The acting and writing were on par with what you see on late-night Cinemax shows about singles retreats at vacation resorts where nobody owns clothing. They obviously couldn't afford to hire a firearms expert, and instead sent someone down to Toys R Us, because the guns aren't even normal-sized. Even the gore effects were lame, and if there's one thing you should get right in a zombie movie, it's the gross parts.

But let's be honest here - if you're watching Zombie Strippers, you're not hoping to discover a rare indie gem. You're hoping to see some naked girls, and you're hoping to see zombies. And there are definitely zombies.

What's missing, however, is naked girls. You've got a movie about strippers starring a girl famous for having sex on camera, and yet for no reason I can deduce, they're shy about full frontal nudity. Sure, there are plenty of topless scenes - Jenna Jameson is half-naked for most of the movie - but in the entire film, you get about five seconds of full-on naked, and even then it's back lit and silhouetted. Boobs are only edgy if you're 15. Adults want to see some genitals.

I'm not a full-blown horn dog. I can enjoy all manner of entertainment that does not contain sex or naked bits of any kind. I don't require adult themes in my entertainment. But if you advertise your film as being about strippers, and then add in that it's got zombies, I go into the film with a certain level of expectation. I do not expect good acting. I do not expect good writing. I don't even expect good effects. But put in a porn star and an illegal strip club, and by God, I expect to see some promised land.

All things considered, however, it's probably just as well that the girls kept their g-strings in place. Because by the end of the film, only two of the girls were even still alive. The others were literally falling apart. Superpowers or not, there's nothing sexy about yellow teeth and bloody gums, and I have absolutely no desire to see naked chicks if they've got liver spots on their areolas. I don't know why I thought I would be amused by a movie about naked dead people. It doesn't matter how smokin' a chick was in real life, once she's dead, she ceases to be sexy.

I guess when I decided to watch Zombie Strippers, I was really hoping for some cheesy grins and some completely unwarranted nudity. But it wasn't funny, it wasn't entertaining, and it wasn't even hot. It was gross and stupid and absolutely foul. I can totally understand wanting to see a movie like this - after all, I did want to see it, until I saw it - but unless you are actually aroused by necrotic flesh, just rent some porn. Or stay up late for those Cinemax movies.

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