Zombie Strippers is an undying classic.
From the moment its title rushed onto the screen in melting, B-movie font to the very last screams of undead-induced pain, Zombie Strippers walked the razor-fine line between work of comic genius and beautiful train wreck. Part bad horror movie, part soft-core porn, part unrestrained misogynistic machinery, and part pretentious masturbation, writer and director Jay Lee’s Zombie Strippers effortlessly asserts itself as the best worst movie of the last five years.
The premise of Zombie Strippers is easy enough to follow. In the not-so-distant future, President George W. Bush, serving his fourth term with Vice President Arnold Schwarzenegger, realizes that there aren’t any troops left to fight the wars between the United States and half of the world (including Alaska). The solution? A chemical that can revive dead tissue and allow soldiers to fight after they’ve already died, with the extra motivation of a hunger for human flesh.
You heard me. Zombies are the solution. To be fair to Jay Lee though, as he cleverly imitates his predecessors in the undead film-making arena, when are zombies ever not the solution? Unfortunately for Squad Z, the zombie-extermination team of busty females who can never seem to keep a shirt on in the line of duty, an infected soldier escapes from the zombie-making government facility. He hides in, you guessed it, a strip club. Chaos, breasts, and undead catfights ensue.
Even considering the movie’s far from subtle title, I hadn’t expected to see breasts quite as often as I did. At least half of the movie is just gratuitous stripping, either living or undead. Although the majority of the strip shows (and, trust me, there are many, many strip shows) are unnecessary and moments of pure service to the audience, there were some instances where the stripping actually served a point. After Kat, the “star” stripper played by Jenna Jameson, gets mutilated by a zombie, she proceeds to strip. The image of dozens of men blindly cheering on a naked, bloody body gives a surprising message, considering the movie’s previous mentality of me-want-more-boobs.
Fret not, however; moments of such subtlety are rare in Zombie Strippers, whose primary goal (outside of having a fun time with the best combination since marijuana and brownies) seems to be beating the audience with a pseudo-intellectual stick.
Everyone knows of instances in movies or books when the character you assumed was slow or dim-witted suddenly speaks up and says something intellectually profound. It’s an easy way to get laughs. However, as Zombie Strippers illustrates, this device can be a double-edged sword. While locating the strip club in Sartre, Nebraska and having one of the strippers declare that Nietzsche was more understandable post-mortem are both instances of clever writing, the rest of Jay Lee’s attempts to elevate this fun and campy movie are awkward and out of place. The strippers continually spout language that is inconsistent in tone with their previous utterances. Hearing one stripper plead to another that she shouldn’t give into the zombie stripping fad because “the mind is a flame to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled” is hilarious not because it’s unexpected coming from a stripper, but because it’s an obvious attempt by the writer to show himself above the trashiness of the movie’s content. Considering that there is quite a lot of trashiness in the movie’s content, this proves difficult.
Like daring a friend to drink the concoction you made during fifth grade lunch by combining everything you could find into one glass, Zombie Strippers is rich in the “Oh no, you’re not really going to, I can’t believe you’re going to — UGH — I can’t believe you just did that and I just saw it” factor. From zombie strippers biting off a man’s penis during a blowjob to two molting undead strippers having a deadly “strip contest,” Jay Lee’s movie provides a plethora of disgustingly fascinating scenes to choose from. While I still don’t know what a “foamy Chewbacca” is, I can say that I will never consider “ping-pong vagina missiles” the same way again.
Jay Lee’s Zombie Strippers embraces its trashiness and camp with little remorse, and, because it does so, produces a fun romp for the audience. The only strike against it comes from the blatant moments of awkward, pretentious masturbation on the part of the writer. Even these, however, could prove to be moments of comic genius. Were those pseudo-intellectual lines and blatantly shallow socio-political messages unintentionally humorous at the writer’s expense, or were they deliberately awkward and obviously strained to further the humor of an already exaggerated work? If the audience laughs either way, does it even matter?
Nothing gets Truc Doan ’10 (tdoan@fas) more worked up than intellectual masturbation.