Zombie Strippers (2008)

The film opens with a news bulletin informing that us that George W Bush has just been elected for a fourth term and that due to the lack of soldiers caused by the dozens of wars the US is fighting across the world scientists are experimenting with re-animating dead tissue. We then immediately cut to a research centre where said experiment has gone very wrong, zombies are loose and an army unit has been sent in to wipe them out. In the course of this one of the unit is bitten and, not wanting to be executed by his colleagues, escapes out of a window. Into a strip club.

This club is called the Rhinocerous which – extraordinarily, bafflingly, pointlessly – is a nod to the play of the same name by Eugène Ionesco. You expect reference to this classic of the Theatre Of The Absurd in a work like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, you are less likely to expect it in a work called Zombie Strippers. There is precious like evidence of a deep engagement with the text though, it mostly just does what it says on the tin: there are zombies, there are strippers and there are zombie strippers. After the cheap, crude but mercifully brief introduction we are treated to half an hour of pole-dancing before stripper-in-chief Jenna Jameson gets bitten. As luck would have it, zombies make excellent strippers and soon the dancers want in on the act.

That is about all there is to the film. There are some attempts at humour and some pretence of social commentary but both pitifully weak. I hoped this would be an intelligent exploitation flick like Planet Terror, instead it is unreconstructed exploitation trash with an incredibly thin veneer of postmodern justification over the top. Basically it only exists to allow you will see four pairs of exposed breasts. Once again I’m remind how hard it is to make a good B-movie.