Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. Isn’t casting Jenna Jameson in this film just cruel irony at this point? At any rate, here’s Capone with his reaction:
Hey friends. Capone in Chicago here. I don't use the word "surreal" very often; I feel it's misused or overused so often that I've all but eliminated it from my vocabulary. But I experienced just such a moment earlier this week when I walked into the screening room where I see many of my press screenings here in Chicago and watched Zombie Strippers with some of the top critics in Chicago, representing the finest the Windy City film criticism universe has to offer. Quite often some of these fine men and women of the print and broadcast media get treated better by the local film publicists; they get invited to screenings that online types like myself are excluded from, and we typically have to wait until the night before a film opens to see it for review. But for the fairly crowded screening of ZOMBIE STRIPPERS, starring Robert Englund and porn legend Jenna Jameson, we were all equals. So why was this experience so surreal? I've watched some fairly explicit stuff in this screening room before, but nothing quite like ZOMBIE STRIPPERS, the kind of silly exploitation stuff that you might stumble upon during a late-night, cable-scanning exercise, the kind you have when you're just on the verge of falling asleep but you want to give those 500 channels one last chance to prove their worth. You might stumble upon this movie during one of its dozen or so striptease sequences or perhaps one of the exceptionally gory head-exploding moments, and you simply would be trapped into watching it until the end. Sure, you'd feel dirty and ashamed when it was over, but you had no option once you spotted a naked walking-dead stripper work a brass pole with a vengeance and then pluck an unsuspecting customer from the crowd, take him into a private room and proceed to eat him down to the bone. Oh yeah, that's the stuff. I'm certainly not completely dismissing ZOMBIE STRIPPERS as T&A garbage, especially since the T&A portions of the film actually work the best of any element of the film. The film's attempt at satire (such as an early newscast sequence in which it is announced the George W. Bush has won his fourth term as president) is way too broad and resulted in almost no laughs. As a zombie film it's passable, especially when it comes to the gore, although much of the truly gruesome stuff is clearly CGI. Still, I can't dismiss a film that doesn't just feature headshots; it has a million head explosions complete with skull fragments, brain matter and various other goop. Indeed, the fake blood flows non-stop. Even the film's attempt to show us the backstage workings of an illegal strip club (I was never quite sure what was so illegal about it since nothing out of the ordinary was going on) seem ridiculous as Englund and his cronies overact to no one's delight. What did work is the subtle subtext that certain adult entertainers will do anything to their bodies to make a buck, including becoming a zombie (which apparently makes you a truly uninhibited dancer). The message is driven home with a little extra kick with Jameson in the cast, since she has clearly had a ridiculous amount of work done to her face (at the very least). Many of the girls struggle to decide whether to do the zombie makeover or not (in this film, zombie strippers apparently only attack you when you ask them to). I'm not going to even attempt to make a case that ZOMBIE STRIPPERS is worth plunking down real money to see in a theater (sadly for Chicago residents, the film is only opening in the suburbs, which is strangely appropriate), but the movie never fails to entertain amidst the terrible jokes, excruciating acting and lame plot. But the film delivers on blood and babes, and where I come from that still means something. Amen! Capone
