With a name like Strippers vs. Werewolves you can assume you know what you’re getting yourself into before watching it and you can also assume it’s going to be pretty bad, with lots of gratuitous nudity and violence. There is always the hope with such a ridiculous title and concept, that it would be at least so-bad-it’s-good or Grindhouse/Troma bad, but inevitably it’s always a crapshoot. When I found out it was British and had Alan Ford (the bad guy from Snatch) and Robert Englund, I started thinking maybe this will be a cheeky little horror/comedy romp. There was hope for this silly little movie after all… My review of the Blu-ray after the jump.
The film starts off with an odd “stripping” sequence where Justice, our heroine played by Adele Silva, is dancing for a male client who seems to be enjoying himself a little too much when he turns into a werewolf. Justice does what any stripper in this scenario would do and stabs him in the eye with a silver pen, killing him instantly. This triggers a pack of werewolves tracking down who killed their fellow wolf and leads them to a “showdown” at the strip club. From the start there’s one thing glaringly missing from a movie called Strippers vs. Werewolves, a movie where the core demographic is teenage boys, I would venture to guess.
And that missing element is nudity.
This has to be the lamest strip club in all of England. Not only do none of the main characters get naked, there are only two girls that do in the whole movie and they are basically background. And it seems like no one bothered to take a pole dancing class before this movie, there wasn’t even any acrobatics to it, it was more like sleepy pivoting on a stage around a pole. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t seek out nudity in R rated films, that’s just silly and I think the idea of skin flicks is a bit outdated, but if you’re going to make a movie where strippers fight werewolves, you either have to make it with a ton of nudity and violence or make it really smart and tongue in cheek B-movie style. This film does neither. It’s not crass or perverted enough for hormone driven 13 year old boys and it’s not smart or quirky enough for a more art house crowd. Couple this with a crippling low budget and you don’t have much that works here.
It gets worse. The budget had to be insanely low. The werewolf effects look like bad Halloween costumes and almost all gore happens off screen or looks cheesy when it actually does happen on screen. It really feels like a student film that was 45 minutes long and then they realized it could be a feature, so they just added a whole lot of pauses back in. Which brings me to my other grip about this movie, the pacing. It is so slow!
Every scene feels like you could drive a truck through the pauses. The editor must have thought because he added flashy comic book transitions it would make up for the dreadful pace of every other scene in the film. It takes forever for the showdown to actually take place and when it finally does, the stunts are laughably bad. Words can’t describe it. The werewolves attack so slow and timid, like an actor that’s never done a fight scene in their life. I still can’t wrap my brain around it.
The acting in the film is not necessarily bad. Most of the cast does a good job with the ridiculous material they’ve been handed; with Dominic Burns, as Alex the occult expert, being the clear stand-out. He actually has some funny bits throughout, including a ridiculous scene where he tracks down two super hot vampire vixens. Steven Berkoff, Alan Ford, and Sarah Douglas do a fine job, but it feels weird to see these classically trained actors in such a bad film. And then there’s Robert Englund. I first thought this was a sequel to Zombie Strippers because he was in both, but to be clear, it is not. Mr. Englund gives a fun little cameo as an imprisoned werewolf, but is barely in the film. The girls are all attractive and elevate the material as much as they can and look awesome in the Little Red Riding sequence in the end, but it’s just too mediocre for anyone to come out unscathed.
Whether you’re a fan of British comedies or a horny teenager that hasn’t discovered how to use the internet and still rents skin flicks, this film is not for either of you. I would avoid this one and wait for what looks like a way better horror/comedy in the upcoming Cockneys vs. Zombies.
Special Features:
- Producers Commentary with Jonathan Sothcott and Simon Phillips
- Behind the Scenes