Strippers vs. Werewolves

Living up to its name, this movie has strippers and werewolves. Strippers vs Werewolves is one of those films that is a terrible and yet could easily be a guilty pleasure cult favorite. It really wants to be a Guy Ritchie film, but it isn't.

The movie begins with an outside shot of Silvadollaz in 1984. It looks like a club of some sort, but we don’t learn any more because it blows up. All the while, a fairly good cover version of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” plays. This is the last of the good music you’ll hear for the next 93 minutes. We jump forward to 2011, where a man sits in a strip club enjoying the stripper who isn’t stripping. He enjoys it so much, he loses control and “wolfs out”. That’s right, he’s a werewolf! And the stripper stabs him in the eye with a pen, a silver pen - establishing that werewolves can be killed with silver to the brain, and to the heart, they deviate from the traditional lore but not far.

Anyway, the strippers who don’t strip keep dancing while the club owner schemes to hide the body of the werewolf before other werewolves find out. We get to meet the other werewolves, one of whom is dating the stripper who stabbed the werewolf at the club. The strippers continue not stripping and the wolves track the scent of their missing friend through the city.

Eventually, the wolves come to the club and we finally get our promised Strippers vs Werewolves, right at the end, and it’s a total let down.

The brightest point in this whole thing is Sinclair, played by producer Simon Phillips. The boyfriend of one of the strippers, Sinclair is an occultist, ghost chaser and vampire hunter, which as first just sounds silly, until the story proves out that he isn’t putting on airs and instead is being completely honest - also we see him fighting some vampires. He’s also extremely self-aware, and by that I mean aware that he’s in a movie. It makes for the best humor Strippers vs Werewolves has to offer.

For me though, the true gem here is the soundtrack. It’s truly uninspired. It sounds like something straight out the 80s, right from Wham!’s playbook, only with terrible lyrics. It’s all performed by Sodajerker. I want to own this, and then I want to have a party at my house and have it playing in the background while people mingle just so I can see the WTF looks on their faces as they try to figure out exactly what it is they are being subjected to. I think that would be amazing!

In any event, the Blu-ray has a behind the scenes feature that is boilerplate, and it includes a commentary track by producers Simon Phillips and Jonathan Sothcott which is fairly standard, but it did offer up one tidbit to explain one of the more annoying elements of the film. You see, this movie is full of strippers, and yet there is very little stripping, or even nudity of any kind. It turns out that one of the women on set convinced the strippers they had as extras that it was in their best interests NOT to be topless. So instead of women wandering around undressed, we got women wandering around fully clothed or at best with pasties on.

Strippers vs Werewolves could have been worse, but it also could have been a whole lot better.