Of Golden Globes and Undead Trollops

Poor Marissa Tomei. Despite giving a bold and provocative performance in The Wrestler, she got screwed out of a Golden Globe because she forgot one of Hollywood's cardinal rules: in much the way that the Academy doesn't reward those who go full retard, mainstream actressess aren't supposed to actually strip. Just ask Elizabeth Berkeley, who committed career suicide with Showgirls; or Jessica Alba, who kept her bra on in Sin City and lived to tell about it; or Demi Moore, who went from playing an empowered, self-actualized ecdysiast in Striptease to a brutalized sexual assault victim in GI Jane. There is a corollary to this rule, however, which is that "exotic dancer" is one of the few roles an adult actress is allowed to portray in the main(ish)stream cinema world. Thus we get Jenna Jameson in Zombie Strippers, the most ambitious exploitation flick you never saw.

At once political satire and titty flick, Zombie Strippers is set in a dystopian near-future in which the religious right and now four-term president George W. Bush have made sex so socially unacceptable that strip clubs have been driven completely underground. A soldier infected with a government-created disease wanders into one, infecting the star dancer. What follows is a 90 minute examination of philosophy, the meaning of life and death, and the obligatory stripping and gore sequences such a premise would demand - and this is likely the only review i ever expect to write where a sentence like that is recorded without a trace of irony.

The zombie plague, you see (it's always a plague these days - an infections disease with a well understood, bodily-fluid-based transmission vector, with no known cure and an unavoidable conclusion; it's zombies that are the cultural allegory to AIDS, not vampires) only turns male victims into the classic Romeroesque shamblers with no soul or vocabulary. Women, meanwhile, retain their intelligence, and gain new powers of speed, strength, and dexterity, accompanied by a lack of fear and incredible unstoppability. The only drawbacks: the slow but inevitable decay of the flesh and an insatible hunger for brains. This means the resultant undead super stripper has essentially unlimited earning potential until she eats her customers, a fact exploited by club owner Robert "Freddy Kruger" Englund, playing against type as a germophobic queen in a performance that has to be seen to be believed.

Though never seeking to rise above a b-movie chuckler, Zombie Strippers actually plays lip service to some fairly complex ideals about the meanings of life and death. The goth dancer, for instance, is fascinated by the state of undeath and longs to experience it for herself; Jameson reads Focault and isn't afraid to drop the names of his theories; the farmer's daughter and her boyfriend grapple with the meaning of existence and whether or not God exists. It's not Shakespeare, but it suggests that the writer and director at least had a search engine and weren't afraid to use it. The script does tend to bog a touch with refereneces that don't really go anywhere, but let's face it - with a title like Zombie Strippers, are you really here for the dialog?

At the end of the day, this is in many ways your basic low-budget camp fest that fails to hit the legendary level of badness necessary to become a cult classic, but is entertaining on its own merits. The acting is over the top as it should be, the stripping is entheusiastic and well-shot, the effects are silly but show continuity, and the film makes just enough zombie oeuvre references to work. You even get a commentary track with both Englund and Jameson, which is almost worth the price of admission alone. The real question is whether Jameson can rise from the death of her adult film career as an undead Julie Strain.

– Tovarich