Zombies Vs. Strippers

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.

Is there any worse setting for a movie, regardless of the genre, than a strip joint? Even more so with horror movies. You would think that movies involving strippers would be titillating, but they never are. In horror movies you need space to run, to hide, to kill. A horror movie confined to a tiny strip joint is a disaster. And so it is here.

We meet some strippers who work at a minuscule strip joint when the zombie apocalypse breaks out. Also the owner is there, a DJ, a bouncer. They don't know what is going on but for some reason some customers sleeping there wake up as zombies. Then various outsiders seek refuge and let the gang known that hell has broken out. They'll try to keep the hordes of zombies from breaking in. One stripper spends her time with some rock guy who shows up. Another one dedicates herself to the bouncer. At some point 3 guys from a motorcycle gang show up and things pick up a little bit as these guys known at least how to kill. But the rest there are pretty helpless once the zombies breach the doors.

Unlike other stripper and/vs ..., this one has at least attractive actresses. Eve Mauro, Adriana Sephora, Victoria Levine are very attractive. The latter two spend a good chunk of time topless. Sephora is particularly lovely. Eve Mauro for some reason doesn't show skin and for that reason alone several points have to be deducted from this movie.

But aside from that this movie has very little going for it. There are 2 or 3 decent gory scenes. The setting as mentioned is too small and lighting is too dark. Acting by some people is good by others isn't. Given the confined setting there's not much you can do in terms of story. And the crew here sure didn't have any ideas. Don't expect any stripper routines either. For some reason there aren't any, which is just as good since pole-acrobatics aren't as interesting as people think.

What is surprising to read is that this movie had an estimated budget of half a million. Where did that money go? It didn't go to the script, effects, sets. I can't imagine these actors got paid all that much. They could have at least paid the lovely Mauro a bit more to take some clothes off.

Aside from the three girls there no reason to watch this.

Zombies Vs. Strippers (2012)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Producer Charles Band and Full Moon are back with this greatly titled but disappointing exploitation film. The story is pretty simple as a group of people take shelter inside a strip joint when the world outside starts to fall apart from zombie attacks. At first the owner thinks this would be a good way to make some quick cash but soon his ladies are having to fight the living dead. ZOMBIES VS. STRIPPERS would be a perfect film for the drive-in era because it gives us a great title but the film itself can't back it up. I think there are quite a few good things going on here including non-stop gore and violence as well as plenty of naked, pretty ladies kicking butt but the biggest flaw is that it's really not all that fun. With a film like this you really shouldn't have to do much but somehow the story just never works and it's just not good enough to where it grabs your attention and holds it. Without the start and end credits this thing only runs 68-minutes and there are many sequences that just get dragged out for no reason. It's clear that the writers weren't sure what to do and especially during the first thirty-minutes as things really do get dragged out. Once the gore and violence does start things pick up but by this time it's a little too late and this stuff still isn't fun enough to save everything. The performances are what you'd expect but I thought for the most part the actors did just fine. The gore effects for the most part look extremely good and there's no question that there's plenty of the red stuff to go around. In the end, ZOMBIES VS. STRIPPERS is worth viewing for "Z" movie fans but there's no question that it should have been much better.

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.

Most bad zombie movies suffer from excess plot but this movie is stripped to its bare essence and benefits considerably. The lead is a fellow named Circus-Szalewski (that's his real name, his character's name is "Spider") who puts on an excellent performance as the down and out owner of a sleazy strip club in the bad part of town. After years of struggle to keep the doors open he decides to sell, but have one last party to say goodbye. Inside the employees peel back their inhibitions and denude their feelings for each other while outside it's the apocalypse. The blaring music attracts patrons dying to get in, some in fact already dead. ZvS is a good bad movie. The acting is all over the place but then some were hired for their assets not their thespian experience. The characters are colorful and varied, especially those remaining robed while the strippers are attractive and contribute more than simple eye candy. The biggest letdown are the zombies. Clearly the extras had no previous experience as walking dead, received no briefing and no directing during. Someone clapped them on the back and said get in there and it shows. The gore is light but B-movie effective with plenty of finger biting and some dismemberment. Most of the budget went into hiring the girls and for this kind of movie that isn't so terrible.