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3 stars (out of four)

The undead. The unclothed. George W. Bush. Eugene Ionesco. Jenna Jameson. “Zombie Strippers” throws all these and more into the meat grinder, churning out an overtly political and philosophical exploitation horror comedy.

Seriously.

To continue wars in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Canada and Alaska, the fourth-term Bush administration’s military has developed a virus that will reanimate fallen fighters, allowing them to fight on as flesh-hungry super-soldiers. It’s the ultimate stop-loss order. The virus gets out and turns Jameson  and her sartorially challenged cohorts into rapidly decaying super-strippers, albeit ones who have as much trouble keeping their skin on as they do their clothes.

Writer-director Jay Lee gleefully cannibalizes, of all things, absurdist playwright Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” flavoring it with dismembered horror cliches and heaping helpings of nudity. The action takes place in Sartre,  Neb., demonstrating that hell is, indeed, other people. And the commentary on social concepts of beauty, particularly in casting sex goddess Jameson as a monster whose appeal to the strip club’s clientele increases with her desiccation, is meaty.

“Zombie Strippers” is a B-movie whose ideas and wit set it well above the great unwashed of the genre. Early on, Jameson’s still-human character is seen reading Nietzsche. Later, post-zombification, she reads the same book and laughs hysterically: “This makes so much more sense now!”

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