Movie Review: Stripperland! (2011) by Stuart Taylor

Stripperland plays on one of my greatest fears: strippers. I rarely feel more awkward than when approached by a stripper: where do you look, what do you do, how do you act? I enjoy sexy ladies, but when they’re stripping and gyrating right next to you, everything just feels awkward and I pray for the world to swallow me up. This is the forte of Stripperland - the strippers are zombies! They like nothing more than tearing the entrails from their victims and feasting on the bloody squishiness within and I say, thank god for them for breaking the tension.

The movie takes place three weeks after a mysterious event caused all the women of the world to become mindless strippers who love nothing more than dressing as sluttily* as possible and luring men to their delicious, delicious doom. Our narrator, a teen boy moron, has escaped the carnage thus far by consulting his How to Pick Up a Stripper guide book, which he is now using as a bible to surviving in the new, cannibalistic,  sexy world. Throughout the film, he reads out the ‘rules’ of strippers, including: ‘Strippers never tell the truth’ (i.e. don’t trust them), ‘strippers are not prostitutes’ (i.e. don’t be fooled into thinking they’ll have sex with you) and ‘strippers love heels’ (hence their slow, ambling zombie-gait). His introduction is intersected with montages of the ravenous strippers, including (explicitly graphic) scenes of: a stripper giving a blowjob, only to bite the penis off; strippers teaming up to rip out and eat a man’s eyeballs; strippers pulling out a man’s intestines. This film desperately wants you to know the dangers of strippers, warning, ‘if we’d thought with our heads instead of our dicks, none of this would have happened.’

Strippers still find time to tend to their bikini line

But at its heart, Stripperland is a heart-warming buddy road movie. The young teen idiot is saved by a butch cowboy in a Hummer who walks up to the strippers, weilding a shotgun and declares, ‘I didn’t bring any dollar bills, bitches! This one is gonna have to be on the house!’. He then shoots the crap out of them. Butch is the best. His first mistake is letting the teen idiot tag along with him, despite being fully aware of his utter idiocy and the fact that the boy can’t bake. Butch seems very obsessed with baked goods; in fact, this is the only thing he really speaks about in more than one sentence. He’s the strong silent type, even stating, ‘I don’t have time for names,’ before naming the kid, Idaho. Thinking that they should call each other after their home towns, Idaho names Butch, Frisco (after San Francisco) and they drive off into the night, with Frisco dreaming of all the ways he could kill Idaho.

Idaho explains that he always carries a briefcase that he’s never opened. His father gave it to him at the start of the stripper apocalypse, telling him to open it only ‘when everything is fucked’. He’s not sure what’s in the briefcase, and he admit he doesn’t even know the combination.

Hip hop - the only way to keep strippers at bay!

Frisco and Idaho’s first stop is at a weird London bus in the middle of nowhere. There are a bunch of zombie strippers mindlessly swaying back and forth while some 60 year old hip hop DJ (who looks exactly like Alec Baldwin! (edit: it’s least of the Baldwins, Daniel)) raps to them over some hot beats. This is when Idaho remembers one of the stripper rules: strippers love hip hop music! They are hypnotised into dancing! Will this come into play later in the film? I’ll tell you what (disappointingly) won’t come into play later: Frisco’s coolest weapon – a baseball bat, wrapped in chains with a buzzsaw nailed to the end! This is the greatest weapon ever created by man, and it is a crime we never see it in action.

At Frisco and Idaho’s next stop, they get to bond a little as road buddies. Frisco continues his ode to baked goods and the two get into a bit of man-banter (manter?) over the relative awesomeness of cakes and twinkies. It all smells very Pulp Fiction, and I believe this is a wonderful ode to Quentin Tarantino himself. Unfortunately, this conversation is cut short, as some non-stripper women are trying to steal the boys’ Hummer! Frisco wants to shotgun them to death, but they argue:

Girl #1: I’m not a stripper, I can’t even dance!

Frisco: Last time I saw a woman like you, she wuz eatin’ a man’s brain.

Girl #2: That shouldn’t take long.

Wooooo – you go girl! This is the beginning of a long narrative of a anti-chauvinism, but, after pleading their innocence, the girls get to join the road trip and our motley crew is complete. Using the existing naming convention, Frisco names the girls ‘West’ and ‘Virginia’. The girls say they are trying to get to Oregon (‘What! That place was full of strippers before the outbreak!’ – Frisco) to see their Grambo. Grambo is their military grandmothe, who is also a bowler, a lodge president and a champion baker. A baker? Frisco is totally on board and away we go!

Idaho, West, Frisco and Virginia

The awesome foursome sneak into an abandoned mall (a dangerous place, as ‘strippers love Hot Topic‘!) to scavenge for supplies, and they meet a lovable elderly pimp, dressed like the offspring of Snoop Dogg and that guy from A Clockwork Orange. I cannot stress enough how much they love this pimp. They act like I would if I got to meet Stephen Fry, laughing at his jokes, looking at him in awe and generally wishing he was their grandpapa. The elderly Pimp has terrific one-liners like, ‘how’s a motherfucker supposed to get a piece of pussy when it be attackin’? Unfortunately, just as they are bidding the Pimp adieu, strippers leap out of the shadows and attack him! Oh no, Pimpy, we hardly knew ye! But the real question is – how are they going to escape back to the Hummer? The answer: West whips out two machetes and starts hacking the strippers to a chunky, meaty grave! It becomes clear at this point that the producers spent all their money on strippers, leaving very little on special effects. The stripper killing appears to be have achieved by frantic edits between West swinging her machetes, arms being pulled from a Barbie doll, and tomato soup being thrown at the camera.

The relationship between Idaho and Virginia, the meeker of the girls, takes an interesting turn here. Finally fed up with Idaho’s stripper-rules, Virginia takes him to task for treating all strippers and all women as homogenous entities and failing to understand the individuality of women. This argument continues throughout the film and it includes the sobering retort, ‘you pay women to pretend they like you’. That shuts Idaho up. In your face, Idaho. I really want Idaho to get strippered to death. He really is a moron.

Dr Logan - not a feminist

Team Awesome take refuge in a casino, where they are captured by mad Dr Logan, a man previously arrested for killing prostitutes. But, he reveals that it was him who started the stripper apocalypse, by experimenting with a virus in an attempt to initiate what he called, ‘Retrowifery’. You see, Dr Logan cannot stand the modern, independent woman; he wishes to return to the era of the submissive wife who cooks, cleans and irons, where the men can feel in control once again. He monologues like crazy about all the things the retrowives would do:

Dr Logan: They’ll do everything – from banging us to baking for us

Frisco: What!? Baking is a special skill. It takes years to master and you want these bitches to do it?

So furious are our heroes that they use their mad fury-skillz to overpower Dr Logan and his men and kick him into his own stripper creatings, where he is eaten alive! Either this film is actually about how is you try and repress woman, they will only rise higher and more powerful than you can possibly imagine, or it just shoehorns this message in to justify the non-stop violence against thong-clad, buxom ladies. I’d opt for the former. This is definitely a strong, feminist film. I’ll tell you why:

1. The women are the most empowered characters. They are either highly-dangerous strippers, or they are one half of Team Awesome – the brainy half.
2. The strippers lure men in by playing on their own objectification of women. By dressing provocatively, they address the fact that men see women as sex object and not as the dangerous, powerful beings they can be.
3. Dr Logan wants to suppress women, and he is the bad guy.
4. The strippers come in all shapes and sizes. There appears to be no attempt made to pick out playboy models to play the zombie strippers. Sure, they’re all dressed in latex and lingerie, but they represent a good spectrum of women.

Now, I’m not saying the film succeeds as a masterclass in feminism, but I do suspect that the creators were so inclined.

Feminist Propoganda

Eventually, our heroes make it to Oregon to a boulevard known as Stripper Alley (note: I know nothing about Oregon – if any readers have any clues, enlighten me!). They are so close to Grambo, they can smell the cookies. Unfortunately, they have to negotiate the final part of the journey on foot as the road is littered with destroyed vehicles. They grab what weapons they can: a shotgun for Frisco, a hoe (snort!) for Virginia, a block of kitchen knives for West and a broom for Idaho. Haha, I really hope Idaho dies soon.

They step out slowly. They hear a baby crying…what could it be? It’s a pregnant zombie stripper with the baby crying out of a stomach wound! Like… this must be some kind of feminist symbolism for… something to do with abortion? It must be! There’s no way my feminist film theory is wrong and this is the sickest thing I’ve ever seen this side of Freddie Got Fingered! Anyway, they charge and fight through an army of strippers, slicing and shooting them to pieces, before barricading themselves in… a strip club! Oh, no! This is surely the worst place to be!

Indeed it is – stripper upon stripper piles in to attack them. Virginia shouts, ‘everything is fucked!’ and that’s when Idaho remembers the briefcase! he opens it, and inside are piles of dollar bills! Rule number one: strippers dance for tips, and tips alone! They throw the tips at the strippers, who dance in the shower of sweet, sweet money. But they are still surrounded – how can they escape? I’ll tell you how: Grambo busts the door down, holding a machine gun and smoking a fat cigar.

‘The kickass begins when I finish my fine cigar!’.

Grambo and her army of octogenarians pile in and beat the living crap out of the strippers! They are saved! Grambo explains, ‘I trained my whole life as a sex weapon.’ Well explained, Grambo. Idaho just points at her, screaming, ‘GILF!’ and surprising he still isn’t killed by any of the main characters. I simply don’t understand. Idaho is clearly a much bigger threat to mankind than all the zombie strippers put together.

Epilogue: Idaho and Virginia hook up, Frisco (who turns out to be gay) gets pie. The end.

Stripperland tries very hard to be a cult, spoof comedy with camp characters, ultra-violence and lots and lots of ladyflesh. You can almost hear it scream, ‘Look at me, college kids – I’m the next Harold and Kumar!” But… it doesn’t quite make it. It is hilarious though. I laughed many times throughout, sometimes at the film but other with it. It knows exactly what it is, but is a little bit desperate in getting there. It doesn’t have quite enough jokes or plot to fill the whole film so there are overly-long scenes and random dullness, but if you don’t go in expecting genius, you might have a good time. Or you might never look at a woman the same way again.

*for the record, I don’t consider the word ‘slut’ in a pejorative sense.

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