Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Film Review: ‘Zombie Strippers,’ 2½ stars

So you thought the last lip-smacking bits of braaaaains had been sucked from the bleached skull of the zombie genre?

Think again, bucko — 94 minutes of the trashiest, cheesiest zombie schlock you’ll ever experience has arrived: “Zombie Strippers,” starring Jenna Jameson, modestly billed in the film’s publicity notes as a “worldwide media sensation.”

If you have no clue who Jenna is or why anyone would call her a “worldwide media sensation,” trust me, you probably wouldn’t want to know. And if you already know, there’s no need to rehash it. Let’s just leave it there, OK?

Her co-stars are no less tawdry:

• Robert Englund, Freddy Krueger of “Friday the 13th” fame, overemoting to a degree that cannot be adequately captured in words.

• Tito Ortiz of “Ultimate Fighting Championship” fame, Jenna’s bullet-headed off-screen squeeze, who gets one line and then vanishes (for good reason).

• Roxy Saint of the Goth band Roxy Saint and the Blackouts, making like Marilyn Manson’s scuzzier kid sister.

In this “sexy, bloody, hilarious good time” (publicity notes), the usual nefarious government experiment goes awry, releasing a virus into an illegal strip club that is right next door to the secret bioweapons facility.

Isn’t that always the way?

Dancers and patrons alike are soon doing the Monster Mash, seeking to sate that undead hunger for living flesh (or, in Jenna’s case, 60 percent living flesh, 30 percent silicone, 10 percent Botox) in a freak show of exploding heads, dismembered limbs, eviscerated organs (braaaaains!) and other requisite zombie-flick flourishes.

If that’s all there was, “Zombie Strippers” would barely be worth the celluloid it was shot on. But there’s a reason this nut-fest gets 2½ stars: the truly twisted philosophical icing slathered on by writer-director Jay Lee.

Lee claims he based “Zombie Strippers” on the 1959 play “Rhinoceros” by French absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco, in which all the people in a small village turn into rhinoceroses except for the central character, a shiftless, drunken everyman.

The play is a criticism of the hive-mind conformity that led large swaths of pre-World War II Europe to zealously embrace the authoritarian doctrines of communism, fascism and Nazism.

In Lee’s film, when Jenna strips as a zombie, she becomes the red-hot rage among the jaded club patrons — forcing the other women to choose between conforming to the new undead chic or retaining their boring human individuality.

Give Lee props for chutzpah; it’s one audacious leap from mid-20th-century French existentialist playwrights to early 21st-century American strippers. But then, the whole zombie concept does seem to open vast new worlds of philosophical dilemma — talk about “being and nothingness.”

Lee wrings every drop of camp from his brilliantly simple conceit — the club is “The Rhino”; the owner (Englund) is Ian Essko; one stripper hails from Sartre, Neb. (“SAR-tree”); and this is the only zombie flick that will ever be made in which a character utters the word “ontological.”

The capper is a gag that starts in an early scene when a still-human Jenna sits in her dressing room, struggling through the works of Nietzsche. Later, as an undead ghoul, she staggers into the dressing room, picks up the book again and growls, “This makes so much more sense now!”

If you get that joke, you’ll get some laughs from this flick — though not nearly enough to keep you from wondering why anyone with a brain (braaaaains!) would put it in theaters, let alone why anyone with even half a brain would pay $10 to see it there.

No worries; “Zombie Strippers” won’t stay in the octoplex more than 15 minutes before slinking off to its rightful home in the bargain bin of your local DVD shop, where it can be rented for a couple of bucks and viewed properly — on a big-screen TV with a bunch of your rudest pals and a case of really cheap beer as you ponder the moral and ethical aspects of Lee’s personal credo:

“I stink, therefore I am.”

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Rated R for splatterific violence, relentless nudity, frequent cussing and serial abuse of Western philosophical thought. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.

REVIEW: The movie

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