Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 5:8	Budget Medium

Wait. What? The strippers want to become zombies? Oh, they're existentialist strippers.

A team of crack marines is called to a research facility where an accidental release of a virus that was supposed to create a super soldier has turned most of the staff into zombies. During the melee one of the soldiers gets bit on the hand and upon witnessing a graphic demonstration of what happens to people who are infected, he sneaks out of the facility and into the strip club next door. After doing her turn at the stripper pole, Kat retires to her private dressing room to read some Nietzsche. Her advise to the new girl is "what does not kill you, makes you stronger", once she has dispense this little gem it is back to the stage where she is attacked and bitten by the infected soldier. Once she has returned from the dead as a zombie, Kat takes to the stage again (dedicated girl, our Kat) and brings the house down. Seeing this, some of the other strippers let Kat bite them so that they too can be popular dancers. Eventually our team of crack marines track their erstwhile comrade to the club just as the zombies reach critical mass and start to chow down on the audience. After cleaning up the mess, they leave as a W Company executive inadvisably sticks his hand in a bag that seems to be moving on its own.

Existentialism: Wikipedia seems to define this a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world and culminates in an expression of the individual over the pressures of society and technology. I am pretty sure I am never going to understand philosophy, but I do know that catch phrases like "that which doesn't kill you..." certainly do nothing to explain the finer details of the school of thought. I suspect that the writer and director of Zombie Strippers read Nietzsche in college and thought it would be amusing to have a pornstar recite the lines. Of my many intellectual weaknesses, philosophy is perhaps my weakest, but It seems to me that doing something just to be popular would be counter to existentialist thinking. The next time I am talking with a stripper, I'll ask her about it. Not to beat a dead horse, but Kat is the first of the strippers to become a zombie and is also the first zombie stripper to get killed completely. The only stripper to survive (providing you don't watch the deleted scenes) is Jessie (Jennifer Holland) who is a follower and she delays becoming a zombie long enough that the rather unpleasant side effects become apparent whereupon she opts out of zombiehood. So, I am not sure what the writer was getting at here. Is being a sheep the way to go? Is he calling Existentialism bullshit? Maybe he is saying it is better to burn up than to fade away?

So, this is my second movie this year with strippers and zombies. Unlike Zombies! Zombie! Zombies!, the strippers in this movie want to become zombies. It seems that the guys just can't get enough of dancing dead girls. You'd think that when giblets of flesh started falling off the girls, the guys would rethink their position. But the crowds get even bigger despite the fact that guys chosen for a special lap dance are never seen alive again. Perhaps the idea is that we are attracted to death and decay. Mere naked women are not decadent enough, the real thrill is putrified flesh in G strings and pasties.

Jenna Jameson stars as Kat, the existentialist stripper. She does a great job dancing and acting. While the acting demands weren't great, she does throw herself into the role including gleefully dismembering the odd club patron or two. Most actors seem to have a love/hate relationship with fans and I would imagine that porn stars are no exception. Perhaps this explains why Jenna seemed to enjoy the chance to rip a fan to shreds. She gets a few good lines; at one point after she has become a zombie she re-reads Nietzsche and states "this makes so much more sense now!". There is something to be said for using an actual stripper for the lead role in a stripper movie. Jenna has the moves and the looks as well as the acting chops to pull it off.

I can't say the same for the commandos. The introduction scene is painful to watch. For starters, they just don't look that tough. Sure the leader spouts a lot of tough guy lines, but honestly if these guys showed up to help with my zombie infested secret laboratory, I'd strongly consider plan B. Or plan C or maybe check to see what the local Girl Scout troop was doing. That being said, it did play out like pretty good satire and I got to imagine that anyone making a zombie stripper movie knows a bit about satire. It should be noted that both times the team goes into action, the babe in the outfit has her shirt ripped off and finishes off the firefight in a bra. The director does not make a big deal of this, but turns it into a bit of a running joke.

The director, Jay Lee, is working in a genre that has a lot of history. Almost as soon as movies were being made, there were horror movies. Nosferatu was made in 1922. While Zombies made a couple of appearances in the 50's, they did not come into their own until George Romero's 1968 "Night of the Living Dead". Since then there have been lots of bad imitations that use cheap gore effects without any underlying statement. See any of the Zombi movies for examples. Zombie Lake manages to have at least as many naked girls as zombies but the only thing I learned from that movie is to not throw dead German soldiers in a lake that has been cursed by witches. Still, Lee takes a stab at making a statement but it is a little to scattered to really pin down his target. Is it religion? Big government? The Bushes in particular? I can't really say. His directing suffers some from that same excesses. He throws in about a dozen styles of filmmaking and resorts to strobe effect for some of the gore scenes. While it makes the film a little uneven for me, there is no denying that it helps keep the movie interesting.

All in all, I think it is a step above his earlier effort "Slaughter" but still has that enthusiasm of a young talented filmmaker. It may be time for Lee to leave behind some of the people that he has used for the past few films and try working with better actors. Or at least move them out of key roles. There are a number of jokes and characters that don't work for me in the film, but overall it is a pretty decent B movie.

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