For the past few months google alerts has returned a high number of hits for the search terms "zombie" and "lapdance." Normally this is rare. But don’t go thinking that everyone is talking about this stupid blog.
No, they’re talking about the hard work and true genius of a largely unrecognized American Hero: Jenna Jameson.
The modern queen of porn transitions into respectability in the film "Zombie Strippers," where she plays the part of a naked dancing zombie. Jameson sinks her teeth into her role (so to speak), quipping about Nietzsche one moment and shooting golf balls from her noonie the next. This might be a serious acting roll for her, but don’t go thinking that her perfectly spherical bowling-ball breasts don’t make an appearance. By all rights they should get second billing.
The nudity is the only thing that isn’t done sloppily in this movie. And oddly enough, the actresses who take it off, far from being the bottom of the talent barrel, give the most nuanced and naturalistic performances of the whole shebang. Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund runs a little slipshod with his now typecast roll "MC for nude zombie dancers," and every other clothed actor follows his lead, hamming it up in a crude parody of a Troma film performance.
In a triumph of audacity, the filmmakers claim that they didn’t write a film around the high concept of zombified strippers, but rather they based their film on Ionescu’s classic of French absurdist theater "The Rhinoceros." I haven’t actually watched any French absurdist plays (because I’m too busy watching zombie movies) but if I had to guess, I’d say that all the non-sequitor speeches the strippers make about the perils of conformity are probably taken verbatim from Ionescu.
And that’s what’s confounding about "Zombie Strippers." Is it an edgy arthouse film masquerading as camp, or an exploitation flick with delusions of grandeur? Or does one option make the other inevitable?
It’s enough to make your head hurt thinking about it. A similar cognitive dissonance probably snared the filmmakers, who try too hard to straddle the line and exist in both states, to be both art and trash simultaneously.
The low-budget spectacle feels as forced as the commentary about the commodification of sexuality. And just when you think the filmmakers have made a valid point, they give us another five minute all-nude pole dance, complete with the tinny, scratchy bass of a strip club sound system. Followed by cannibalism.
"Zombie Strippers" takes a sleazy inflatable sex doll of a premise and blows it up with pretensions of profoundity.
But the last thing I want to do is criticize anyone who has made a connection between lapdances and zombies.