Jarv’s Schlock Vault: Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

“Get the motherfucking zombies out of this motherfucking strip club”

Jarv’s Rating: 1 Chang-Not completely terrible, but an open goal missed.

This should have been so fucking easy. Seriously, this is not hard- Zombies+ Strippers= hilarity and gold. This film is not gold. More like copper. There are moments of genius comedy, but overall I was left with the feeling that really, cretins, how did you manage to fuck this premise up so badly?

The film doesn’t hold a lot of promise when it first opens. To be honest, on first attempt, I actually turned it off as it induced a painful, horrible Ankle Biters flashback in me.  It opens outside “Romero” (har-de-fucking-har) in a parking lot (which brings me to a theory- the more time B-movies spend fucking about in a parking lot, the worse they are) with 2 talentless fuckers being attacked by some of the worst looking zombies that I’ve ever seen. Thankfully, this is a dirty red herring- it’s actually someone watching a terrible film on TV.

Thank fuck. Then the film starts proper, basically, there’s a movie scientist fucking around with green liquid again (when will they learn? Green liquid in films= bad things happening).  A fat junkie terms up to get his “crack cure” off the doc, there’s a fuck up, and he ends up taking a load of green crystals instead of the cure. It turns out that the green crystals transform people into the living dead.

Cut to strip club. Inside we’re introduced to our intrepid heroines, doing some of the most lackluster stripping ever, in fact, it’s not unreasonable to assume that they are already living dead. A load of crack whores have got hold of the zombie crack and eventually the mock living dead strippers are being attacked by real zombie crack whores, and forced to take refuge inside the strip club itself.

Our motley crew of heroes eventually overcome the zombie horde, using the exact same device used in (the far superior) Daybreakers-  but with added shit CGI. It’s pretty unoriginal and uninspiring stuff.

So, as with Splinter, given that it’s unoriginal, it has to be judged on it’s effectiveness, and this film comes a right cropper on this score. They were obviously attempting the ludicrously difficult tightrope of Comedy-Horror, but unlike Shaun of the Dead, they fall of the tightrope and plummet towards earth like a fucking lift with the cable cut.

The comedy, with one exception that I’ll come to in a minute, is execrable (the motherfucking zombies quote I used is actually real- I know it looks like I made it up, but I honestly didn’t). The Horror is non-existent. It’s just not scary, the gore is unconvincing and the effects are fucking dismal.

On the very basic levels of cinema this is a fail. The script is patchy (being kind), and the direction is sub-par. However, once again it falls victim to the curse of shit sound work. There’s an annoying hissing sound that runs all the way through the film. I thought originally that our DVD player or speakers were fucked, but it isn’t us. To make things more annoying, the dubbing is out of sync with the dialogue. It’s like watching an old Bruce Lee film, except without the inherent coolness or entertainment that comes with watching an old Bruce Lee film.

The acting is also fucking dismal. The woman that plays Dakota (I can’t be arsed to look up her name as she couldn’t be arsed to do anything that remotely resembles acting) is fucking awful on every level. Dallas is a bit better, and Harley is a little bit better as well. But really, nobody is good in this.

So given all the above, is there any reason to watch this film? Well, this film rated one Chang for me, and that is purely down to the character Johnny “Backhand” Vegas. Johnny is the local pimp, and he’s hilarious. He’s a complete fucking douchebag, obviously, and he is responsible for the motherfucking zombies line, but aside from that almost everything else he does is comic gold. There’s an absolutely hilarious moment when he takes on the horde and attempts to pimp slap his way to freedom. The end of the film (spoiler, but who gives a fuck), has him pimping out his last remaining zombified whore and hilariously staples a brunette wig to the whore’s head.

Overall, would I recommend this film? Not really. If it existed in a vacuum, then I might as Vegas does supply some chuckles and it is about strippers and zombies, but as we all know it doesn’t. Unfortunately for this effort, anyone with an interest in strippers, the undead or an unfortunate combination of them both can easily get their hands on the vastly superior Zombie Strippers.

Avoid this crap like a stripper’s used g-string, go and get Zombie Strippers instead- it’s much sharper, much funnier, much more gory and generally much better than this shitty effort.