Everything You Could Hope For

in a Movie Called "Zombie Strippers"

During George W. Bush's fourth term as president, the administration's desire for crises and predisposition toward fuck-ups leads to the creation of a zombie virus that the government hopes will help replenish troops for its various overseas conflicts.

Infected women become super-strong and maintain their intelligence, but the men remain your typical, shambling, mindless undead.

So when the virus leaks into a strip club, the place becomes the most popular illegal joint in town.

All too often with horror/cult movies, a catchy title masks a low budget and an even lower level of talent, but director Jay Lee (The Slaughter) delivers absolutely everything you could possibly hope for in a film called Zombie Strippers.

There's a consistently hilarious, brutal, and titillating mash-up of Return of the Living Dead and Showgirls that actually beats out Mark Pirro's Nudist Colony of the Dead for the unofficial title of best naked zombie movie ever.

He even manages some George Romero–style social commentary, with zombie-dom as a metaphor for plastic surgery—that star Jenna Jameson's plasticized, pre-zombie face is actually scarier than the final monstrous version only proves the point.

Smashing Schlock

Those excited by the words “Zombie Strippers” alone won’t be disappointed by Jay Lee’s unabashedly schlocky film, which he wrote, directed, shot and edited.

Strewn with some surprisingly decent effects, this unevenly paced film delivers, if nothing else, on the promise of its title: lots of surgically enhanced nude dead women strutting their stuff.

Voice boxes intact — uncharacteristic for screen zombies — the bloodied pole-dancers become more desirable to the strip club’s clientele of drooling idiots, many of whom serve as postshow snacks.

The undead’s popularity sparks jealousy among the still-living performers and intensified greed in the club’s sleazy boss (Robert Englund), who realizes there’s a killing to be made (in more ways than one, of course).

In addition to drawing inspiration from Eugène Ionesco’s ever-relevant absurdist play “Rhinoceros,” it’s full of jabs at the Bush administration and philosophy references — for starters, Jenna Jameson, as the first stripper to succumb to zombification, reads and quotes Nietzsche.

But all intellectual touches remain secondary to the catfights and carnage of Ms. Jameson and her leggy colleagues, clearly the main attraction here.

Clever Horror Flick

The undead. The unclothed. George W. Bush. Eugene Ionesco. Jenna Jameson. "Zombie Strippers" throws all these and more into the meat grinder, churning out an overtly political and philosophical exploitation horror comedy.

Seriously.

To continue wars in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Canada and Alaska, the fourth-term Bush administration's military has developed a virus that will reanimate fallen fighters, allowing them to fight on as flesh-hungry super-soldiers. It's the ultimate stop-loss order.

The virus gets out and turns Jameson and her sartorially challenged cohorts into rapidly decaying super-strippers, albeit ones who have as much trouble keeping their skin on as they do their clothes.

Writer-director Jay Lee gleefully cannibalizes, of all things, absurdist playwright Ionesco's "Rhinoceros," flavoring it with dismembered horror cliches and heaping helpings of nudity.

The action takes place in Sartre, Neb., demonstrating that hell is, indeed, other people. And the commentary on social concepts of beauty, particularly in casting sex goddess Jameson as a monster whose appeal to the strip club's clientele increases with her desiccation, is meaty.

"Zombie Strippers" is a B-movie whose ideas and wit set it well above the great unwashed of the genre.

Early on, Jameson's still-human character is seen reading Nietzsche. Later, post-zombification, she reads the same book and laughs hysterically: "This makes so much more sense now!"

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