Thursday 2 February 2012

Zombie Strippers (2008)




If you’ve gone through shitloads of classic genre movies, you definitely noticed that Lucio Fulci is the man, who made a first crossover between zombie genre and sexploitation in his cult classic "Zombie" (1979), pitched with a real market wit as a sequel to George A. Romero’s "Dawn Of The Dead" (1978). Honestly, I do not enjoy zombie movies a lot… still good ones come as a surprise. After all, it’s better to be nicely surprised than to be left truly disappointed. Saying this I have to admit I’ve had a lot of fun with trashy "Zombie Strippers", which delivers exactly what is spelled out in the title – topless & undead chicks stripping… and as they’re fuckin’ hot it makes your worthwhile. Is this movie funny? Definitely, even if jokes from time to time get flat-lame, cause what saves the day here is the unprentencious humour-nudity-gore formula. Who would actually believe, that so worn-out genre might still kick around and provide you such a giggle? Well, it does and at least it worked for me.

In the spirit of classic gore & nudity Fulci, director Jay Lee spins his flick around zombies, naked broads and machine gun overkill. It’s the nearest future and George W. Bush just banned public nudity making all strip clubs illegal (ho, ho, ho!)… while somewhere in Nebraska a top secret, governmental laboratory is researching a deadly chemo virus, that turns people into zombies. Soon situation sneaks out of control and elite, military Z-Squad is called in to solve the problem. Unfortunately, one of the Rambos gets bitten by an undead, making his way out ASAP in fear of being eliminated by his – till this point – combat companions. Before poor lad turns into zombie though, he gets to sneak into the underground strip club, ruled by metrosexual Ian (Robert Englund) and his Russian supervisor bitch, where rest of the action will take place.



Suddenly we’re in the middle of the action and we get to to see some sweet piece of ass as the gals come on stage and strip away their bikinis. The cast is pleasant with Jenna Jameson leading this gig, but all other actresses, either stuffed with silicone or not, are nicely kickin’ softcore eye-candy. When hard work turns into a nightmare and first stripper gets turned into a zombie, we’re jumping on a roller-coaster of better-or-worse ideas, how this will affect the business. As it occurs, nothing makes a better treat than spinning a tragedy into a buck-rolling machine, so when the owner takes the risk of keeping green coming with the brand new bloody zombie strippers show, that leaves the public ravishing – they want the undead chicks BADLY! This however effectively takes the wind off other strippers’ sails, who must jump on the bandwagon in order to keep the job. They work the floor as well, so when one is caught with a customer biting his dick off turning him and next the others into zombies, problems start to pile up. Initially, newly found undead customers are locked in the basement, but soon an orgy of terror will follow bringing justice to greedy fuckwads managing the club and all slut strippers themselves… hell yeah!

"Zombie Strippers" not only provides an overfill of zombies and nudes, but spoofs on all classic genre themes. We even find a homage to gangsploitation classic, "The Warriors" (1979), when one of the undead gals is rattling two bottles singing: "Warriors, come out to playyy-ayy!" So nice and kind of neat indeed. Although this is not the best exploitation revival flick, released recently, it definitely has a classic exploitation call and a lot of minor genre musings with twisted humour glazing on the top. As we might expect, it looks cheap, but not too cheap – something between "Blood Feast II" and "Planet Terror". The movie leaps from gore exploitation to comedy, but overlaps both with a healthy layer of nudity, which keeps it rolling when dialogue lines are getting sloppy (you don’t like nudity, don’t watch it just to complain afterwards). Some intellectual rocks like a scene with a stripper reading Nietzsche might seem blundering, but they don’t really spoil anything mostly drowning in the background in a moment they’re gone. Do you have to watch it? No, you’re not gonna lose anything, but if in the hood why not give it a sneak peek.