Strippers Vs. Were-Wolves: The Review

Director: Jonathan Glendening
Cast: Adele Silva, Billy Murray, Ali Bastian, Nick Nevern, Martin Compston, Barbara Nedeljakova, Sarah Douglas and Robert Englund
Plot: A pack of werewolves prowl London. When one of their own is accidentally killed by a stripper, they unleash hell on the staff.

I really wanted to hate this movie. I tried really hard. Most of the time, a B Movie has a neat-sounding title (when I hear there is a movie about Dragon Wasps, deep down, I usually want it to escape the bad title and surprise me by doing really well), but amounts to very little. Here, I showed up wanting to write a pompous, critical review about how a misogynist director gets away with filming barely-clothed women taking on werewolves in terrible prosthetics and condemning a clunky script. However, for whatever reason, I actually ended up liking this movie quite a bit.

Its main weapon is the fact that it actually enjoys just being itself. Most of the B Movies I have seen have enjoyed making themselves, often featuring a group of macho male soldiers taking on CGI monsters, but Strippers Vs. Werewolves is more interested in entertaining the audience. It stops and thinks how best can it get across its dumb B Movie nature in a way that will appeal to a group of people, bored at home and wanting to watch something that requires little intelligence to keep up with. It takes the B Movie idea of werewolves and makes them come against a group of strippers, an idea that instantly earns it a watch from blokes out of curiosity (not even bloggers are immune, it seems). It comes across as the sort of movie that doesn’t actually work out, but it has a secret weapon. Humour. Some of the jokes are bang on the mark. It isn’t the over-the-top set-pieces, like the occasional reference to other supernatural monsters out there, but the small punch-lines the movie slips into the script. The little jokes keep the film going and stop the cheesy dialogue from becoming too apparent. The American readers might want to be warned that this does require a certain British sense of humour (as well as fun in watching moderately famous British actors pop up), but for the most part, it does a good job of keeping everything ticking over enough to not be the usual mess that I usually have to review for Wednesdays. It does have its fair share of problems. In fact, there are hundreds of them. The main gripe that did wind me slightly is the fact that it sold itself with some of the more famous faces (Martin Kemp, Lucy Pinder – again, for the Brits more than the Americans), but they turned out to be little more than cameo appearances. Admittedly, Robert Englund turns up for one cameo that becomes the best scene of the film, getting across everything you want from a cameo by the maestro of the horror genre. However, it feels cheap when the new faces are the only ones that stick around after a few bloody opening scenes. The pacing is off by miles. It races along, cutting through scenes faster than the blink of an eye. We jump between werewolves and strippers so frantically, it becomes a struggle to keep up with what is going on. Then there is the finale, which is a little bit of a mess all around. It isn’t sure what to do with itself and you want it to at least attempt something a little more intelligent than an on-screen scoreboard. However, even when looking at these hundreds of problems, Strippers Vs. Werewolves remains a fun piece of B Movie cinema, complete with a great soundtrack and some amusing laughs. These days that is all I ask for.

Final Verdict: No, this is not a good movie, but the director, nor you, will care as soon as the jokes kick in.

Three Stars