The Manda Wonders Why She Doesn't Work for The A.V. Club

Somebody actually made the following movie: "Zombie Strippers" starring Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson. Tagline reads, "Bloody mayhem in the champagne room."

Englund, you may remember, gained fame in the 1980's with his portrayal of Freddy Krueger in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" film series. Jameson is well known as an actor and producer of adult entertainment.

But it's free on On Demand, and K Rock and I have a pretty morbid sense of curiosity, so we decided to give it 20 minutes while we were waiting for the take out to arrive, even though we were wondering how it ended up among the regular On Demand free movie offerings.

A quick check of the IMDB revealed that this film was produced in 2008, in 18 days-- which incidentally is the same number of days it took to produce Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation"-- and came in under budget at $1 million.

I don't really know where that million went, because it wasn't for production values, acting, or special effects. A lot of barbecue sauce went into making this film.

But it IS clearly revealed from the outset that this is to be a horror movie: the opening voiceover tells us that it's W.'s fourth term in office with Arnold Schwarzenegger as veep.
K Rock: "So far, it's like something from The Onion."
Manda: "So it's a political satire."
K Rock: "Silly us for underestimating Jenna and Robert."

The plot of the film is fairly simple. A zombie gets loose from a government lab that is conducting experiments to create a super-soldier. The zombie makes his way to the town of Sartre-- yes, like THAT Sartre-- Nebraska. The town name, naturally, adds some intellectual credibility to the proceedings.

Upon arrival in Sartre, the zombie ends up at a strip club called The Rhinoceros, because the film is loosely based on a French allegorical play of the same name. This parallel further underscores the deeply existential implications of the film's themes and content.

K Rock: "Never before has a Jenna Jameson film inspired me to read French literature."
Manda: "Have you ever seen a Jenna Jameson film?"
K Rock: "Well... no...."

The first zombie-- Private Birdphlew (or some other spelling that is pronounced Bird Flu) bites a stripper (Jameson) at the Rhinoceros club, she then does her dance as a zombie, which makes the crowd of frat boys from Central Casting go wild and start throwing money. The unscrupulous club owner (Englund) then pressures the other strippers to become zombies so he can take their earnings while feeding them selected members of the audience. Of course, these audience members become zombies as well, but they're kept caged up in the basement of the club, because obviously you want to keep increasing numbers of live zombies incarcerated in the basement of a bar.

And there are a lot of boobies.

So there you have the existential themes and content.

Eventually the army-- wearing belly shirts-- shows up to save the day, which prompts K Rock to comment: "Are those regulation haircuts?"

One of the army guys gives us pause, actually.
K Rock: "This guy thinks he's in a Blaxploitation film from 1977."
Manda: "I thought he was going for the Ice-T on 'Law and Order' vibe."
K Rock: "But the beret and the hint of an Afro and the clearly posturing dialect."
Manda: "That's where I was getting the Ice-T effect."

The film contains other stereotypes that are so over the top that I can only hope and pray that they were meant to be ironic. There's the Sleazy Manager's business partner, a woman with a generic Eastern European accent that she either learned from watching Bela Lugosi or "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoons. There's the maintenance guy, Paco, whose cart features a Mexican flag and a bottle of tequila and whose lines mostly seem to hinge on rehashing variations and puns on "We don't need no stinking badges." Paco goes out in a blaze of glory, wearing a sombrero and an ammo belt and smoking a cigarillo. It was like watching a living, breathing South of the Border billboard.

Yet the film has its moments of genuinely funny dialogue, like when The New Stripper, a wholesome Midwestern stereotype working to afford a colostomy for her grandmother, says to her religious right boyfriend: "Maybe there's more truth to me taking off my clothes for emotionally stunted men so my grandmother can shit in a bag than in my staying pure and virginal for you."

Between that and the stripper zombie reading Nietzsche, there was some real potential for some female empowerment and breaking of stereotypes. Alas, the gratuitous nudity kind of killed that potential.

Later, K Rock and I would deconstruct the film and agree that this was a movie that could have been cult classic campy, but the influence of production execs who were looking for more nudity was bleeding obvious (pardon the pun). We ended up watching the film in about half the time allotted because we fast forwarded through most of the dance sequences.

Still, the film included this exchange just after Jameson becomes a zombie:
Jameson: "I've never felt more alive."
Other Stripper: "Sweet irony."

Which means this movie is still smarter than Alanis Morrissette.