Review No.137: Strippers Vs. Werewolves

What's the best way to follow an amazing blockbuster and a great Turkish film? How about with a low budget film which has a cast full of soap stars and a cameo from Freddy Krueger, well even if that isn't the right answer I did end up watching Strippers Vs. Werewolves. Jonathan Glendening's film does really exactly what is says on the tin as a bunch of exotic dancers from a club called Vixens have to wage war with some werewolves after one of the head werewolves played by Martin Kemp is stabbed in the eye by a silver pen wielded by former Emmerdale starlet Adele Silva. As the strippers come to the realisation that their landlady has been fighting off the werewolves for years there's more heartache for Silva's Justice as we find out that her boyfriend Scott is one of the werewolves. The strippers' one shining light is that one of them is dating nerdy vampire hunter Sinclair who gives them ideas of how they can finish off the werewolves including one amusing scene in which they wield a sunbed in order to replicate sunlight. Glendening tries to create some sort of backstory involving the alpha werewolves and Vixens' senior staff members however the film is definitely at it's best when Becca from Hollyoaks is trying to shoot Billy Murray of The Bill and Real Lawyers 4U fame with silver bullets.

What can you say about film called Strippers Vs. Werewolves? Well it's definitely rubbish but I'm still struggling to work out if its purposely rubbish or it's part of the joke. Phillip Barron and Pat Higgins' script is definitely written as a comedy it's a shame then that the majority of the cast members don't realise they're meant to be making the audience laugh it seems to me that they believe that they're in a low budget British version of True Blood. As you can imagine the make-up for both the werewolves and vampires is rubbish while the scenes in Vixens are aptly seedy while both Kemp and Englund are game in their brief cameos. However the only member of the main cast who impressed me was Simon Phillips as Sinclair making his character a sort of  nerdy Van Helsing who is batting above his weight in his relationship with the exotic stripper. In terms of low-budget Brit comedies it's a step above Kill Keith Chegwin which should've been a lot funnier than it was and it's true that the majority of the supporting cast are brilliant here however there wasn't enough in Strippers Vs. Werewolves to convince me that it was anything more than a naff attempt at camp humour.

Verdict: A couple of laughs and game cameos save this from lapsing into a completely awful film but instead it's a naff low-budget mess that should really have gone straight to DVD thus a grade of 2.5/10