CHATSWORTH, Calif. — While not quite the best movie of the year so far, as LA Weekly declared, Jenna Jameson's first foray into Hollywood leading-lady-dom, Zombie Strippers, is a lot of fun.
Jameson stars as Kat, the star attraction at an underground strip club where she spends her time in the dressing room between sets reading Nietzsche. The retired porn star carries herself well through the movie ... in fact, doing the best acting job of the entire troupe of players.
Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund is way, way over the top as money-grubbing club owner Ian Essko (writer/director Jay Lee borrowed the plot from Ionesco's play 'Rhinoceros'; the name of the town is "Sartre," by the way.) Carmit Levité plays Madame Blavatski, a, um ... well, we're not sure what her role in the scheme of things is supposed to be, exactly, other than to blurt out commands in a phony Eastern-European-ish accent to the girls while smoking from one of those extended Cruella De Ville-style holders.
Through some convoluted happenings, Jenna gets infected with a secret government zombie virus that turns her into a super stripper who instantly becomes all the rage among customers, and Englund wets himself over the tidal wave of cash that starts flowing in. The other girls get increasingly jealous of the amount of attention Jenna's receiving, and a couple of them ask her to pass along the zombism.
The big problem here, of course, is that zombies gotta eat, and the customers are their buffet. Which in turn means that the number of zombies escalates exponentially, and they have to be somehow quarantined. Conveniently, there's a gated cell in the club's basement, so Englund and his cronies just throw them in there.
Zombie Strippers attempts to make an allegorical social statement a la George Romero about the American public's blindly trudging along in step with the Iraq war. And it succeeds at least in making the parallel, if rather bluntly.
Mostly, though, it's just an hour and 45 minutes of blood, guts and titties — yes, Jenna is topless during practically all of her screen time — with a few absolutely priceless moments (Jenna's comment in reference to her Nietzsche book after being zombified; the "dance off" between her and one of the other zombie strippers later in the movie), and a very true-to-form Z-movie feel. Though the special effects are actually rather impressive.
If Zombie Strippers doesn't receive a longer and wider theatrical run than initially slated (today is the last day it's playing at its sole Los Angeles venue, the Landmark NuArt), it's sure to gain a healthy cult following on DVD.
As for the big question: Does Jenna Jameson have a future in mainstream movies? She really just might.
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