Zombie Strippers.

"Zombie Strippers, a Joe Bob Briggs-worthy piece of nudie-horror camp opening this weekend, is in no danger of being accused of false advertising," writes Ryan Stewart for Premiere. "Director Jay Lee clearly viewed the film's title as a challenge to be risen to, delivering not just another zombie-splatter pic but something that occasionally plays like the wet dream of a necrophiliac.... Whatever planet these dance sequences are happening on, their cuckoo surrealism is the movie's saving grace."

For Luke Y Thompson, writing in the Voice, this is "a consistently hilarious, brutal, and titillating mash-up of Return of the Living Dead and Showgirls that actually beats out Mark Pirro's Nudist Colony of the Dead for the unofficial title of best naked zombie movie ever."

Updated through 4/23.

Rob Humanick in Slant: "Though broader and less funny than Idiocracy, the political commentary of Zombie Strippers is effectively one-note, keeping things short and sweet as the film moves from one hot dance number to another with a steady flow of exploding heads in between, schlocky genre titillation distilled to its essence."

"A former stripper and horror-cinema scholar such as myself might be expected to judge such a film harshly," writes Peg Aloi in the Boston Phoenix. "But I found it well-directed, sexy, schlocky, and sublime."

"Sure, it claims to be based loosely on Eugène Ionesco's classic absurdist play Rhinoceros and, sure, it features allusions to a number of philosophers, including Camus and Sartre, but really it's dumb and silly and a heck of a good time," writes Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. "Particularly if you're anything but sober."

But for the AV Club's Scott Tobias, "The film's devotion to smug, self-conscious camp lets the audience know early and often that the filmmakers and actors are in on the joke, and that they aren't mindless purveyors of boobs and blood. That above-it-all attitude isn't convincing, and what's more, it saps any fun or cheap titillation that might have been had from this dreary enterprise."

Updates, 4/18: "Zombie Strippers is a B-movie whose ideas and wit set it well above the great unwashed of the genre," writes Michael Ordoña in the Los Angeles Times. "Early on, [Jenna] Jameson's still-human character is seen reading Nietzsche. Later, post-zombification, she reads the same book and laughs hysterically: 'This makes so much more sense now!'"

"Though not nearly as clever as it aims to be, the film at least tries," writes Laura Kern in the New York Times.

Update, 4/23: "It's funny that this flick should appear almost exactly a year after the failure of Grindhouse, as Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's $100 million monument to garbage culture was sorely lacking the subversive inquiry that makes this sort of schlock stand out," writes Stephen Wells in the Philadelphia Weekly. "Tarantino and Rodriguez offered a megabudget wax museum, whereas Zombie Strippers is the real deal."

Posted by dwhudson at April 17, 2008 4:05 PM