Strippers vs Werewolves 2012 delivers very little for horror fans, says ANDREW GARVEY
TITLE: Strippers vs Werewolves
YEAR RELEASED: 2012
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Glendening
CAST: Ali Bastian, Marc Baylis, Adele Silva, Lysette Anthony, Steven Berkoff, Robert Englund
Deep down in the grim recesses of my Netflix watch list lurk some genuinely abysmal films. You know the kind – pointless twaddle, bad sequels and epic fails that surely could only have been released due to some kind of industry-wide practical joke with the poor, suffering consumer the unlucky recipient of the punchline.
Strippers vs Werewolves, which delivers very little in the way of strippers and not much more in the way of werewolves, is one of them.
A film that seems to have been planned down the pub, while reading back issues of Loaded magazine and then taken from concept to finished script in about four hours, it’s boneheaded, lazy and dull.
It’s not the worst horror film I’ve ever seen, or even the worst one about werewolves but it IS one of the most redundantly disappointing.
In fairness, there are a few decent jokes and lycanthrope homages here and there (“you made me miss”) and amongst the interchangeable glamour models pretending to act and Danny Dyer-wannabes, there’s a fairly solid cast.
Familiar faces include British soap opera veterans (Adele Silva, Billy Murray and Martin Kemp), a ‘proper’ actor slumming it (Steven Berkoff), genuine younger talent like Martin Compston and some guy called Robert Englund whose gurning cameo suggests he may have a future in horror movies.
But quite why some of the above signed up for this is a mystery.
Not exactly a box office success, it supposedly took in a whopping £38 on it’s first week on release. Yes, that’s £38, or less than the price of two drinks in the kind of clubs where much of the film is set. Or so I’m told.
Anyway, the story concerns some angry, criminal werewolves upset that one of their own has been killed by a stripper who dances in a club owned by an old enemy. They seek revenge. Some bad werewolf make-up is applied, transformations helpfully tend to take place off-screen, some gore is thrown about and there’s lots of Cockney swearing. The strippers of course fight back.
There’s also a pointless subplot featuring a pair of very distracting vampires (Lucy Pinder and Sabine Jemeljanova) whose costuming consists of lingerie and those fake plastic vampire teeth you used to get in Christmas crackers and/or cheapo toy shops.
The silly title and obvious concept promise much in the way of cheesy fun but the film delivers very, very little, even for a fan of bad horror films.
Released, unfortunately, in the same year as the far superior Cockneys vs Zombies, this suffers badly from the obvious Brit-horror-comedy comparisons. Watch that instead.
Watch Strippers vs Werewolves 2012 trailer
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