HOLLY CULP
Arts Editor

The 2008 film Zombie Strippers! is, as its title may suggest, atrocious.

But it’s also awesome: horribly, horribly awesome.

The premise is simple: Illegal strip club owner Ian (played by Robert Englund, star of the Freddie Krueger films) makes a killing when his star stripper Kat (the ubiquitous Jenna Jameson) is killed by an infected soldier and contracts a virus that turns her into an undead, flesh-eating zombie with the remarkable ability to maintain speech and motor skills. When Kat contracts the virus, her already notable stripping skills improve sevenfold and the audience loves it.

After word gets out that she’s dead, she comes back to life and goes back on stage covered in her own blood, the men begin throwing money at her.

When the other girls at the club catch wind of the growing trend, they get jealous and soon, one by one, they being to conform to the trend. Eventually Ian has a whole troupe of flesh-eating strippers and he’s making a lot of money. While the strippers somehow manage to maintain their ability to strip and speak, their victims — strangely — turn into normal, moaning, slow-assed zombies, which begin to slowly accumulate in a makeshift prison in the basement of the club.

There are a few strippers who don’t conform to the growing zombie trend, one of whom is a sweet Christian girl who has taken up stripping in order to pay for her Nana’s surgery. In addition to this ludicrous plot point, she has a sexually frustrated boyfriend who follows her around hoping to see her boobs and corrupt her purity, which he never does. Although there are plenty of boobs in this movie, kids. There are also a lot of sub-par special effects, blood, guts and racism.

There is an interesting inclusion of stereotypical characters in this film as well, including a sort of head-mistress type character who supervises the strippers to keep them in line. She seems to be of the Transylvanian influence and says things like “Ve must vork togeeeythurrr.” Beauty.

Second is the Mexican janitor Paco (yes, Paco) who, while loading his pistol to fight the growing army of zombies, kisses each bullet naming them “Pancho Villa, Guacamole” and so on, as he goes.

But possibly the most ridiculous part of this movie is the depressing attempt it makes to be insightful on the human condition. In the beginning of the film, Kat is seen reading the works of Fredrich Nietzsche (which is preposterous because we all know strippers don’t read) which is somehow supposed to contribute to the overall theme of the movie. Other characters attempt to say profound, meaningful things on selfhood and individuality and fail miserably as any insight is lost in the nonsensical, rambling, ever-escalating ridiculousness of this entire film.

See it.