When a movie comes out called Zombie Strippers, it's a given that I'm gonna see it. And I sort of resent that.
It's not that I don't think there should be a movie called Zombie Strippers. (Frankly, I'm stunned it took this long.) It's just that I dislike feeling pandered to. To me, the title seems a little forced, a little too on the nose. The people who made this movie think they can just slap the word "zombie" together with the word "strippers" and I'll come running. And they're 100% right, but fuck them for being so presumptuous. We both knew it was a done deal as soon as Zombie Strippers and I laid eyes on each other, but it doesn't need to act so cocky about it. Sure, I'm easy, but does that mean I don't deserve to be romanced a little bit? C'mon, Zombie Strippers. At least buy a girl a drink first.
Anyway, when a movie has an awesome title like Zombie Strippers, you can be reasonably certain that the title is going to be the most awesome thing about it. So I knew going into this thing that it was going to be a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am type situation. I knew that Zombie Strippers was going to seduce me with the promise of sexy, splattery hijinks, then leave me vaguely unfulfilled and somewhat embarrassed afterward. It was always going to be a one-night stand, just a rough and sloppy 90 minutes of forgettable fun. No promises, no strings, no future. But dammit, I guess I'm just a romantic at heart, because I dared to hope for more. I see no reason why a movie called Zombie Strippers has to be a one-off timewaster, a movie you see just so you can say you saw it. I mean, if I thought that way back in 1990, would Frankenhooker and I still be together after all these years? You gotta dream, man, or what's the point?
Well, it turns out my first instinct was the correct one. Zombie Strippers is a better title than a movie, but it does have its moments.
We start out with a phony baloney news report that fills us in on the backstory of the Zombiestripperverse. In the near future, George W. Bush has just been elected to his fourth term (And the award for Most Instantly Dated Plot Device goes to…), and as his first order of business, has banned all forms of public nudity. We also learn that the U.S. is low on troops because of all the wars we're fighting in France, Venezuela, Alaska, etc., so the government is experimenting with zombie soldiers.
Then we cut to the hallways of that same old abandoned mental institution where 90% of every direct-to-DVD horror movie gets shot. The zombies are already on the rampage, and a dude in a lab coat watches them through shatter-proof glass and says, "Behold a pale horse." Which would be a pretty solid line if I thought the screenwriter was actually referencing the Bible verse it came from (Revelation 6:8) and not the Johnny Cash song that they use in the opening credits of the Dawn of the Dead remake. So already this flick is ripping off a ripoff, which lets you know that it's one of those self-conscious winky-winky flicks that want you to know that it's all just a big joke so there's no need to hold the movie up to any kind of standard of quality.
I'm sorry, fellas, but that dog won't hunt. Go ahead and make your movie funny if you want, but admitting right off the bat that it's all just a big laugh and that we shouldn't take it seriously is a huge cop-out. It means you don't have the balls to treat your absurd but workable premise with the respect it deserves, so you attempt to circumvent criticism by letting us know that you're "in on the joke." If you really wanted your movie to be funny, you'd have the courage to play it with a straight face and trust us to get the joke on our own. The way it is now, Zombie Strippers is like some awkward fat dude who makes self-effacing jokes at parties, not realizing that if he didn't point out his flaws, people might just overlook them.
Anyway, so the government calls in cinema's eight gazillionth knockoff of the space marines from Aliens. They spout a bunch of self-consciously satirical dialogue that wouldn't sound out of place on South Park but sounds pretty stupid coming out of the mouths of crappy straight-to-video actors. Then there's some reasonably spooky Ridley Scott-inspired backlit photography and some CGI-enhanced head explosions before one of the soldiers gets bitten and hides out in a nearby underground strip club run by Robert Englund. His star attraction is Jenna Jameson, whose boobs are so fake they look like special effects. Even before she turned into a zombie, I kept expecting them to burst open and have a bunch of tentacles come out.
So then the soldier bites Jenna, but the twist is, being a zombie makes her a better stripper. So then all the other girls have to follow suit if they want to keep up. I think this might be some kind of metaphor about all the plastic surgery that models and sex workers have to get to stay competitive. Speaking of metaphors, you can tell that the filmmakers thought they had a real rich stew of allegory going here, what with all the political jokes (the zombie serum is created by a company called W Industries) and the references to sociosexual peer pressure, but none of it really comes together into anything semi-coherent. I think it's all about choosing not to become a zombie, even when everyone else is doing it, which is a clear reference to America's apathy in the face of our ongoing War on Terror. All the strippers are also big into quoting from philosophy books, but that seems more like the screenwriter showing off the stuff he learned in college than any kind of legitimate thematic concern. All this stuff is pretty ham-handed, proving that movies are never dumber than when they're trying to be smart.
Anyway, Zombie Strippers is one of the new breed of exploitation movies that try to be naughty and transgressive but never succeed in being legitimately sleazy. They throw in all this industrial metal/Suicide Girl shtick, and it just ends up seeming like reheated Rob Zombie. This is what happens when nerds try to get kinky. Back in the day, you had real perverts like Jess Franco making this shit. Nowadays, it's just geeks with laptops who think nudity is funny. That's why none of the sex and gore is actually sexy or shocking. It lacks the courage of its convictions.
Like I said, there are some good moments, like when a stripper rips a dude's jaw off and bites his tongue out, or when Jenna (who looks surprisingly creepy as a zombie) battles her archnemesis by shooting billiard balls at her from her coochie. And there are lots and lots of ugly prosthetic boobs on display, if you like that sort of thing. Personally, I like boobs that flop around a little bit when you shake 'em, but maybe I'm just old fashioned.
I didn't have a bad time watching Zombie Strippers, but its problem is that it's simultaneously trying too hard and not trying hard enough. Clearly, the world needed a movie called Zombie Strippers. I'm just not sure it needed this one.
Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Shock Waves
Shock Waves is your basic pretty good horror movie. It's got a pretty good story, pretty good acting, pretty good direction, and it's based on a pretty good idea. The problem is, I don't really do pretty good movies. Pretty good movies don't make for very interesting reviews. But since I promised long-time reader and indispensable nerd studies correspondent Dan that I'd review it because he won the first annual Spot The Other Simpsons Reference In My Hawk The Slayer Review sweepstakes, I'm giving it my best shot.
Shock Waves is about these indestructible aquatic Nazi zombies who get trapped in their sunken ship off the coast of some Caribbean island. Then they come back to the surface for some reason, possibly related to the never-explained shock waves of the title. The DVD cover calls Shock Waves "the best of the Nazi zombie movies." I love that Nazi zombies get their own sub-sub-genre, but if this is the best one, then somebody needs to get to work on raising the bar right now. Like I said, this is a pretty good movie, but I tend to think that a movie about Nazi zombies who stalk hot chicks in bikinis should be a lot sleazier than this. Luckily, there's this German nazisploitation flick coming out called Dead Snow that looks pretty rugged. Usually, German horror movies are joyless affairs about systemic cruelty and corpse-fucking, so I'm looking forward to seeing if they can finally lighten up and make one that doesn't make you want to disembowel yourself while jerking off so that you cum geysers of blood, like in the heartwarming conclusion of Nekromantik.
Shock Waves starts with an actual still photo of some Nazi officers, looking like the Cocky Aryan Asshole Academy's graduating class of 1946. A Larroquettian narrator tells us the story of an SS unit that had been created from the corpses of dead prisoners and psychopaths. They were supposedly invincible warriors who killed with their bare hands, but since no members (Heh, I said "members") of their unit (Heh, I said "unit") were ever captured, their existence could not be verified. This little intro was clearly trying to go the Texas Chainsaw route of blatantly lying to the audience and telling them that what they are about to watch is based on a true story, even though it's total bullshit. I appreciate that kind of dishonesty in a movie.
Then the movie totally fucks with you by introducing a second narrator. As we see some fishermen rescuing a sun-damaged ingénue from a rowboat adrift in the middle of the ocean, we hear her voice telling us that only now does she remember the ordeal that put her in that situation. Then we flashback to happier times, when she was an outrageously adorable brunette in a canary-yellow bikini. She's played by Brooke Adams, whom you may remember as the chick who could make her eyeballs wobble in the first Body Snatchers remake. Already we've got two narrators and a flashback, so you'd be forgiven for thinking this flick was in trouble. That's the kind of shit Al Adamson used to pull when he'd try to combine footage from three different movies into one supermovie about bankrobbers and go-go dancers and mad scientists. But don't worry, things get much more straightforward from here, and the movie ends up being very professional for what must have been a punishingly low budget.
As Brooke warms her cupcakes in the sun, we meet all the passengers and crew members of this shitty little boat that's on its way to God knows where. Among others, there's the hunky first mate in mustache and bell bottoms, the alcoholic cook, and the captain, played by legendary thespian and Carradine paterfamilias John, who was notoriously unparticular about the movies he allowed himself to appear in. This one could clearly only afford him for a few days, because he disappears after the first 20 minutes. He's nice and crotchety in the few scenes he's in, though, so I think they got their money's worth.
This early sequence also introduces the bane of this movie's existence: the asshole character who is in the exact same predicament as everybody else, yet feels the need to complain about everything all the time as if it were only happening to him. He's a prissy bastard with a whiny voice who looks and acts like Porky Pig, minus the endearing stutter. He reminded me of my first college roommate, a middle-aged 21-year-old who smelled like the water that collects on top of cottage cheese and thought that black people were an urban legend. Both of them covered up their essential lack of social skills with an unfunny brand of petulant sarcasm that makes large groups of otherwise nonviolent people want to kill them, sink their bodies in the swamp, and never speak of it ever again. Luckily, this character is one of the first to die, but it doesn't happen soon enough, and his suffering is over far too quickly.
Anyway, after the introductions are over, the sky turns yellow for some reason and there are some bubbles in the water. I guess this is when the "shock waves" raise the zombies from their aquatic slumber. Then the boat gets lost and everybody washes up on this island, where Peter Cushing is practicing his German accent on every third or fourth line of dialogue. He's the commander of the Nazi zombies, and he's been hanging out in this abandoned hotel for 30 years, waiting for them to come back. Touch-and-go accent aside, Cushing does right by the role, as usual. One thing about Cushing, you could always count on him to give his all. Carradine might phone it in more often than not, but Cushing always gives you full value. He's about a hundred years old in Shock Waves, but he's still tromping around the jungle like an infantryman, wearing a short sleeve shirt that reveals his bony old arms, which are by far the scariest things in the movie. His forearms are so veiny they look like porn star cocks.
Anyway, Shock Waves is sort of notable in that it's a zombie movie that doesn't really owe much of anything to the Romero zombie mythology. It came out after Night but before Dawn, so it's not fully locked into the rules yet. These zombies don't eat flesh, they're not contagious, and I don't think you can kill them by shooting them in the head, although nobody ever tries. In fact, I find their whole reputation for indestructibility to be highly suspect, since they take no damage through the course of the film. They don't get stabbed, hacked, bludgeoned, shot, electrocuted, set on fire, or any of the awesome things that people like to do to zombies. The only way to kill them is to take off their stupid goggles, which makes them just sort of keel over and die. This is where Shock Waves drops the ball. Half of the fun of zombies is that, unlike werewolves, vampires, Jasons, or other superpowered monsters, their victims have a sporting chance. Get yourself a weapon and keep moving and you could probably take out your fair share before their numbers inevitably overwhelm you. That's why people love zombie movies. They get to experience the taboo exhilaration of chopping motherfuckers up with no consequences, while still getting the thrills and chills of your standard people-in-peril flick. It's the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, Shock Waves only gives you the best of one world. And not even really, since all the zombies ever do to people is drown them. There is seriously not a single drop of blood in this movie.
But what Shock Waves does have going for it, in addition to Brooke Adams' constantly displayed cleavage, is some nice atmosphere and some strikingly designed monsters. They're like Kraftwerk zombies, dressed in matching black jumpsuits and moving in synch with each other, which leads to some pretty great shots of them rising up out of the water in staggered patterns silhouetted against the horizon.
The pace of the film is slow and dreamy, its eerie ambiance aided by an early synthesizer score. One thing I liked about the way the standard cat-and-mouse suspense scenes played out was that the victims more or less had the right strategy, but then they'd completely fuck it up at the last minute. Like, they have the entirely workable idea of locking themselves in the walk-in freezer, but then the panicking claustrophobe shoots off a flare gun in there and they have to evacuate because of the smoke. Or there's a part where they're pushing a small boat out to sea. They're almost home-free, but then one of them falls down, so everybody stops and then the boat drifts away and they're suddenly totally fucked again. Stuff like this adds to the nightmare feeling of the flick. You ever have one of those dreams where you're just trying to do one little thing like put your shoes on or fuck this chick you went to high school with, but then suddenly everything changes on you? Your shoes disappear and you find yourself wandering the streets barefoot, or maybe that chick from high school suddenly turns into Steve Buscemi and you wake up questioning your sexuality? The movie's like that. Unlike the zombies, which never decompose, Shock Waves is an exercise in entropy. Everything goes wrong all the time, despite the characters' best attempts to hold it together. Sort of like life, only with less blood and way more of Peter Cushing's naked, throbbing forearms.
UPDATE: Dead Snow is in no way a better Nazi zombie movie than Shock Waves. Also, it's Norwegian, not German. I keep thinking everything's German lately.
Shock Waves is about these indestructible aquatic Nazi zombies who get trapped in their sunken ship off the coast of some Caribbean island. Then they come back to the surface for some reason, possibly related to the never-explained shock waves of the title. The DVD cover calls Shock Waves "the best of the Nazi zombie movies." I love that Nazi zombies get their own sub-sub-genre, but if this is the best one, then somebody needs to get to work on raising the bar right now. Like I said, this is a pretty good movie, but I tend to think that a movie about Nazi zombies who stalk hot chicks in bikinis should be a lot sleazier than this. Luckily, there's this German nazisploitation flick coming out called Dead Snow that looks pretty rugged. Usually, German horror movies are joyless affairs about systemic cruelty and corpse-fucking, so I'm looking forward to seeing if they can finally lighten up and make one that doesn't make you want to disembowel yourself while jerking off so that you cum geysers of blood, like in the heartwarming conclusion of Nekromantik.
Shock Waves starts with an actual still photo of some Nazi officers, looking like the Cocky Aryan Asshole Academy's graduating class of 1946. A Larroquettian narrator tells us the story of an SS unit that had been created from the corpses of dead prisoners and psychopaths. They were supposedly invincible warriors who killed with their bare hands, but since no members (Heh, I said "members") of their unit (Heh, I said "unit") were ever captured, their existence could not be verified. This little intro was clearly trying to go the Texas Chainsaw route of blatantly lying to the audience and telling them that what they are about to watch is based on a true story, even though it's total bullshit. I appreciate that kind of dishonesty in a movie.
Then the movie totally fucks with you by introducing a second narrator. As we see some fishermen rescuing a sun-damaged ingénue from a rowboat adrift in the middle of the ocean, we hear her voice telling us that only now does she remember the ordeal that put her in that situation. Then we flashback to happier times, when she was an outrageously adorable brunette in a canary-yellow bikini. She's played by Brooke Adams, whom you may remember as the chick who could make her eyeballs wobble in the first Body Snatchers remake. Already we've got two narrators and a flashback, so you'd be forgiven for thinking this flick was in trouble. That's the kind of shit Al Adamson used to pull when he'd try to combine footage from three different movies into one supermovie about bankrobbers and go-go dancers and mad scientists. But don't worry, things get much more straightforward from here, and the movie ends up being very professional for what must have been a punishingly low budget.
As Brooke warms her cupcakes in the sun, we meet all the passengers and crew members of this shitty little boat that's on its way to God knows where. Among others, there's the hunky first mate in mustache and bell bottoms, the alcoholic cook, and the captain, played by legendary thespian and Carradine paterfamilias John, who was notoriously unparticular about the movies he allowed himself to appear in. This one could clearly only afford him for a few days, because he disappears after the first 20 minutes. He's nice and crotchety in the few scenes he's in, though, so I think they got their money's worth.
This early sequence also introduces the bane of this movie's existence: the asshole character who is in the exact same predicament as everybody else, yet feels the need to complain about everything all the time as if it were only happening to him. He's a prissy bastard with a whiny voice who looks and acts like Porky Pig, minus the endearing stutter. He reminded me of my first college roommate, a middle-aged 21-year-old who smelled like the water that collects on top of cottage cheese and thought that black people were an urban legend. Both of them covered up their essential lack of social skills with an unfunny brand of petulant sarcasm that makes large groups of otherwise nonviolent people want to kill them, sink their bodies in the swamp, and never speak of it ever again. Luckily, this character is one of the first to die, but it doesn't happen soon enough, and his suffering is over far too quickly.
Anyway, after the introductions are over, the sky turns yellow for some reason and there are some bubbles in the water. I guess this is when the "shock waves" raise the zombies from their aquatic slumber. Then the boat gets lost and everybody washes up on this island, where Peter Cushing is practicing his German accent on every third or fourth line of dialogue. He's the commander of the Nazi zombies, and he's been hanging out in this abandoned hotel for 30 years, waiting for them to come back. Touch-and-go accent aside, Cushing does right by the role, as usual. One thing about Cushing, you could always count on him to give his all. Carradine might phone it in more often than not, but Cushing always gives you full value. He's about a hundred years old in Shock Waves, but he's still tromping around the jungle like an infantryman, wearing a short sleeve shirt that reveals his bony old arms, which are by far the scariest things in the movie. His forearms are so veiny they look like porn star cocks.
Anyway, Shock Waves is sort of notable in that it's a zombie movie that doesn't really owe much of anything to the Romero zombie mythology. It came out after Night but before Dawn, so it's not fully locked into the rules yet. These zombies don't eat flesh, they're not contagious, and I don't think you can kill them by shooting them in the head, although nobody ever tries. In fact, I find their whole reputation for indestructibility to be highly suspect, since they take no damage through the course of the film. They don't get stabbed, hacked, bludgeoned, shot, electrocuted, set on fire, or any of the awesome things that people like to do to zombies. The only way to kill them is to take off their stupid goggles, which makes them just sort of keel over and die. This is where Shock Waves drops the ball. Half of the fun of zombies is that, unlike werewolves, vampires, Jasons, or other superpowered monsters, their victims have a sporting chance. Get yourself a weapon and keep moving and you could probably take out your fair share before their numbers inevitably overwhelm you. That's why people love zombie movies. They get to experience the taboo exhilaration of chopping motherfuckers up with no consequences, while still getting the thrills and chills of your standard people-in-peril flick. It's the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, Shock Waves only gives you the best of one world. And not even really, since all the zombies ever do to people is drown them. There is seriously not a single drop of blood in this movie.
But what Shock Waves does have going for it, in addition to Brooke Adams' constantly displayed cleavage, is some nice atmosphere and some strikingly designed monsters. They're like Kraftwerk zombies, dressed in matching black jumpsuits and moving in synch with each other, which leads to some pretty great shots of them rising up out of the water in staggered patterns silhouetted against the horizon.
The pace of the film is slow and dreamy, its eerie ambiance aided by an early synthesizer score. One thing I liked about the way the standard cat-and-mouse suspense scenes played out was that the victims more or less had the right strategy, but then they'd completely fuck it up at the last minute. Like, they have the entirely workable idea of locking themselves in the walk-in freezer, but then the panicking claustrophobe shoots off a flare gun in there and they have to evacuate because of the smoke. Or there's a part where they're pushing a small boat out to sea. They're almost home-free, but then one of them falls down, so everybody stops and then the boat drifts away and they're suddenly totally fucked again. Stuff like this adds to the nightmare feeling of the flick. You ever have one of those dreams where you're just trying to do one little thing like put your shoes on or fuck this chick you went to high school with, but then suddenly everything changes on you? Your shoes disappear and you find yourself wandering the streets barefoot, or maybe that chick from high school suddenly turns into Steve Buscemi and you wake up questioning your sexuality? The movie's like that. Unlike the zombies, which never decompose, Shock Waves is an exercise in entropy. Everything goes wrong all the time, despite the characters' best attempts to hold it together. Sort of like life, only with less blood and way more of Peter Cushing's naked, throbbing forearms.
UPDATE: Dead Snow is in no way a better Nazi zombie movie than Shock Waves. Also, it's Norwegian, not German. I keep thinking everything's German lately.
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