"Zombie Strippers" manages a preternatural combination of theater of the absurd, hot pink lingerie, and the Smith and Wesson air soft pump action shotgun.

The ability of the 20th century's major Continental philosophies to adapt to the 3rd millennium is examined through the competing Weltanschauung of a cadre of sharply divided strippers in the American Midwest.

The characters are forced to define and own their ontology when a government manufactured zombie virus is unleashed. Yes, it may be possible to continue stripping after coming back from messy death, but is there more to life?

Ultimately, both the Nietzschean Ubermensch and Satre's existential despair are shown to be inadequate responses to the human condition, as well as to the zombie condition. In fact, a greater level of alienation then has been previously imagined is shown to be possible when a being is left severed from humanity while still sentient.

The failing Gestalt of excessively broad Panglossian optimism is laid bare, along with the entire cast. Rather than presenting a justification for self-annihilating submission to a mob which demands conformity as payment for acceptance, the protagonists must embrace individualism both qua the only reasonable way to survive and qua the innate demand of humanity.

Sacrificing the enduring emotional vitality and undeniable free will of a human life span for the illusion of release to be found in reanimation leads only to unrecoverable angst for those strippers who submit to the zombie virus.

This piece is properly read as a modern re-assessment of the lessons the Enlightenment. While a cynical view of religion's ability to define the scope and meaning of life is buttressed, we all - even a zombie in her actual death throws - must account for our choices. Infinite rebirths are not an option.

Meanwhile, fresh philosophical challenges are brought to bear in the characters of an aging Russian lap dancer and her harsh pragmatism and Paco, the illegal janitor who draws on his own cultural traditions to script a deeply personal reaction to the zombification of his co- workers.

Numerous definitions of humanity are tested: rationalism, logic, empathy - but it ultimately our ability to choose life and to find beauty in the sheer act of being alive that separates the living from the merely undead. The audience is asked to reconcile being human and being alive, having first debated if there is is a foundational schism at all.

More deep is the question hinted at and left unanswered by the film: if science, in the form of a toupe wearing lab tech who unleashes a chemo- virus that reanimates dead flesh, unleashes evil; and if the humanities, in the form of remarkably fresh looking strippers who toss off gems of epistemological wisdom between turns on the stage, are left to address the terrible question of whether to choose zombification for greater tips, where is the solution?

Believers in eleatic monism may be disappointed, but anyone who has ever wrestled with Being and Becoming will find some common themes dressed up like new with nipple tassles.

The title is a no-brainer, just imagine Showgirls or a Russ Meyer soft-core sexploitation/titillation meets a real George A. Romero zombie film, and then you know what to expect. Basically it is the near future, and a secret government re- animation chemical virus, made to bring dead tissue of soldiers back to life, has got out in the facility of Sartre, Nebraska. While eliminating as many zombies as possible, Major Camus (Catero Colbert) and Lieutenant Ryker (Jen Alex Gonzalez) manage to let bitten marine Byrdflough (Zak Kilberg), afraid of being killed, get away, and he ends up in a near underground strip club. Blyrdflough manages to bite star stripper Kat (porn star Jenna Jameson), but apparently women have more of a threshold, so she is turned into a zombie, of sorts, but still doing her job, being much more sexy than before, and earning much more money for greedy club owner Ian Essko (Robert Englund, aka Freddy Krueger). Obviously the affected girls that follow, along with Kat, still have a hunger for flesh, but they and Ian make sure they eat back stage, so the money can still roll in, and the zombie customers are locked up. Eventually though the success is to end when someone lets out the zombie customers, and the zombie strippers just attack anyone in the open, and the specialists do show up to help the survivors get out alive. Also starring Roxy Saint as Lillith, Penny Drake as Sox, Whitney Anderson as Gaia, Jennifer Holland as Jessy, Shamron Moore as Jeannie, Jeannette Sousa as Berengé, Carmit Levité as Madame Blavatski, John Hawkes as Davis, Jessica Custodio as Kwan, Laura Bach as Sassy Sue and Joey Medina as Paco. Englund is great at being mad, he's kind of like that in real life, and Jameson makes a reasonably good actress, most people think she is too beautiful to be a porn icon, maybe she should have gone down this route. As for the zombie stuff, the gory effects are just as over-the-top as a proper zombie flick, and the dialogue is deliberately rubbish, so you can sit back and a enjoy a good satirical comedy horror, or you can enjoy flesh eating creatures getting naked and pole dancing, I know it's not a good film, but it's worthwhile enough as a horror comedy. Okay!

This movie is just horrendous. Now, I know what you're thinking. When you rent a film featuring porn star Jenna Jameson and titled Zombie Strippers!…how good can you really expect it to be? Well, I never really expected this thing to be any good. I had hoped that it might be one of those "so bad, it's good" movies. Instead, it overshoots "so bad, it's good" and lands in "so bad, it's really, really, really bad".

The story, which is filled with lame jokes and wrapped up in some juvenile political satire at the expense of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, starts with a squad of soldiers sent to put down a zombie outbreak at a research lab. A virus was created to reanimate corpses so they could be used to fight in war. One of the soldiers gets bitten and runs away to an illegal strip club, where he bites the lead dancer (Jenna Jameson). She becomes a zombie, which in addition to filling her with the hunger for human flesh, also makes her a much better stripper.

She bites a couple of other strippers and these undead skanks become a sensation, driving degenerate strip club patrons into such a frenzy they don't even care when a living girl gets naked on stage. That provokes jealousy and horror in some of the other strippers. However, the strip club owner (Robert Englund) just enjoys all the money he's making, though his plan to keep the strippers' zombified victims locked up in the basement turns out to be more trouble than all the money in the world. They get loose, chaos breaks out, including a zombie strip-off and an undead vagina being used in a way that I can't quite figure out how to describe.

In fairness, Zombie Strippers is trying to be an over-the-top comedy. But there's an enormous emphasis on the word "trying" in that sentence. The jokes are putrid and this crew of alleged actors has all the comedic timing of a broken metronome that's sticking out of the burst stomach of a dead pig that's been left under the hot sun all day. I've seen Holocaust movies that were funnier than this film.

This is another example of actors who can't act and a writer/director who can neither write nor direct. This bunch of losers thinks they can get around that by being intentionally awful. The whole charm of that sort of film, though, is that it's an honest and spectacularly failed attempt at making a good movie. Setting out to make a hilariously bad film is like intentionally becoming the world's fattest man. The end result is never pretty to look at.

If you're one of the three people on Earth who hasn't already seen Jenna Jameson naked, you can find it in Zombie Strippers. Be forewarned; only two other actress get nude in this thing and only one of them is attractive. There is lots and lots of blood and gore and you can see Robert Englund embarrass himself with humor too corny for even the worst Nightmare on Elm Street sequel.

If you took some of Jenna Jameson's XXX films and edited out the graphic sex, you'd probably end up with movies that were still better than Zombie Strippers. Don't even bother with this DVD.