Zombies Vs. Strippers

I picked up some DVDS from a local pawn shop this afternoon and got a "Midnight Horror collection" 4 in 1 DVD set of Full Moon films. This is one of them.

A gentleman's club on a bad side of town isn't getting much business. The few customers that they do have are basically lifeless. The club owner "Spider" decides to sell out and shut down the club. Tonight is going to be a party for the staff.

A cash paying customer "Spike" walks through the door with 16k that he stole from another bar. Spider and crew decide to entertain Spike. If they can get his money, they can save the club and their jobs.

After Spike shows up, more people show up and the trouble begins as the strippers must fight off the zombies.

This is pretty much standard Full Moon fare.

Hot chicks and bloody carnage, what more could you want? I hear people all the time say that Zombies Vs. Strippers just ripped off that Robert Englund movie Zombie Strippers, but honestly I thought Zombie Strippers took itself way too serious. Zombie vs. Strippers starts off goofy and doesn't let up. You go into this wanting blood, babes, badassness and that is what you get. This is good old-fashion cheesy zombie horror. Also, I thought that Circus-Szalewski, who plays the owner of the strip club does an amazing job. Do I need to explain the plot? It's Zombie Vs. Strippers, it's simple bloody horror at its finest. Plus, there's plenty of boobs and you can't go wrong with that.

This is one of those movies that struggles with its identity. Billed as a comedy it really doesn't contain that much humor. At the same time, it doesn't quite measure up as a good zombie film because of all of the attempted comedy. In other words, it suffers from the exact same problem that so many other "zombedy" (zombie-comedy) films have--they're neither scary nor funny. Add in the fact that this was a low-budget production and the difficulties become even more pronounced. Having said that, this wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. The acting was adequate for the most part with Circus-Szalewski (as the bar owner named "Spider") probably putting in the best effort. Likewise having Eve Mauro (as the stripper "Sugar Hills") and Adriana Sephora (as "Jasmine") certainly helped to improve the scenery. All in all then, this film wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been and I suppose I should be thankful for that. Slightly below average.

This movie is one of several films to come out at the same time with the theme of Zombies vs. Strippers, it is also the most directly titled. It also possibly had the most simple story and the lowest budget, and in many ways it succeeds because of this.

While the other examples on the list try to do some weird stuff, (face dance anyone?) the simplistic elements of this story make the film able to use what it has to make a pleasant zombie-horror-watching experience.

Do you want to see people being eaten? Do you want to meet a whole host of survivors who get slaughtered mercilessly throughout the movie? Do you want to see a group of attractive women nearly naked the whole time? Well then this is a movie you will enjoy! (If the answer was no to any of those questions then move along since this film has little else.)

As a zombie aficionado, I have to put my decaying hands on just about anything zombie I can come across, and with a title like this, I was fearing that it was going to be as bad as the 2008 "Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!" movie. But luckily I was just a notch better than that movie, not much, but just enough to make it bearable to sit through it to the very end.

Full Moon have some fairly questionable, but still worthwhile horror movies to their names, movies that are pseudo-legends in their own way, such as "Puppet Master" and the like, so you generally know what you are going to get from this movie. And it has been quite some time since I have stumbled upon something from Charles Band, so it was a nice surprise with this movie.

The story is fairly simple and straight forward, easy enough to follow even for the zombies amongst us in the audience. Set in a small, shady strip club, a group of exotic dancers and their boss find themselves trapped in their going-out-of-business strip club with hordes of the undead wrecking havoc in the city and pressing hard against the doors, hungry to get in to the debauchery and subtle flesh beyond the unlocked doors.

The zombies in the movie were adequately made, not overly amateurish, but just lacking enough gore and ghastly effects to be outstanding. But in overall, they did well enough with the zombies, and I have seen far worse in many other zombie movies.

As for the characters in the movies, well they were so one-dimensional and stereotypical that it was just downright awful. I am not saying that the people cast to portray these were doing bad jobs, just that the characters in the movie were not really characters that came off as cleverly thought through. And the questionable dialog all throughout the entire movie sure didn't help make the characters become more realistic.

If you are a zombie aficionado like me, then "Zombies vs Strippers" is well worth a watch if you haven't seen it already. Yes, it is low budget, but they pulled it off well enough to be entertaining.