A zombie virus breaks out in the lab, and a team of military specialists goes in to take control of the situation, in Zombie Strippers. Of course, they do a piss-poor job and someone who’s been infected escapes and heads for the nearest illegal strip club, Rhino’s, owned by a fast-talking sleazoid named Ian Essko (Robert Englund).

The girls are a mixed lot containing a virgin from Sartre, Neb.; nasty rivals; one who reads Nietzsche (after she becomes the walking dead, she says, “Now this stuff makes so much more sense”) and star attraction Kat (Jenna Jameson). The male audience goes nuts for the girls after they become zombies, and the limbo bimbos turn into the super-strippers.

The picture was written, directed, shot and edited by Jay Lee, with dialogue assistance from Zarathustra. Supposedly inspired by Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinoceros, in which everyone is eager to conform by becoming the title beast, Lee’s script is a grab bag of horror movie parodies — one zombie begging to be shot in the head is a dead-on poke at The Fly — and some kind of commentary on people who love the dead a little too much. As if that’s even possible.

Mostly, however, the whole thing is an upraised middle finger pointed at mainstream filmmakers who enjoy slumming by making imitation down-and-dirty exploitation movies while maintaining their memberships in the Cahiers du Cinéma fan club. You ain’t gonna catch Robert De Niro in the sequel to this puppy. —Doug Bentin

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Disjointed but markedly entertaining (maybe it’s all the breasts) is The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, the ninth entry in AIP’s highly successful Beach Party series. There’s nary a Frankie nor an Annette, but their absence matters not. Hell, in my book, nothing else matters when you have super-stacked Susan Hart (Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine) in your movie. It’s just too bad her damned bikini is invisible!

She fills the spiritual role of a recently departed, but still totally hot soul who hangs around the haunted mansion of newly dead Hiram Stokely (Boris Karloff), whom Hart tells can gain entrance into heaven and be young again if he can do a good deed within 24 hours. Four of his potential heirs — including a golly-gee Tommy Kirk and corrupt lawyer Basil Rathbone — show up at the house for the reading of his will and to find his hidden million-dollar fortune.

Coinciding is the arrival of a busload (literally, a busload!) of teenagers in their swimsuits, shaking their tailfeathers to the groovy tunes of the Bobby Fuller Four, who experience seizure-like jerks as they perform. A MILFy Nancy Sinatra is among the bunch, and she belts out a number of her own. There’s a plant among the teens in the form — and oh, what a form! — of Quinn O’Hara as Sinestra, a curvy, busty, nearsighted redhead who plots to kill one of the young men on the hunt for the treasure. What is it about attempted murder that makes for lighthearted comedy?

I don’t even have room to mention the gang of bikers led by Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck), a runaway gorilla, a requisite old lady, the most offensive portrayal of an American Indian in motion-picture history, the basement-housed chamber of horrors, a kajillion non-sequiturs, two kajillion slapstick bits, a knife-wielding mummy in a wig, and a bubble monster roaming the halls.

And of course, the occasional appearance of Hart’s blue-tinted apparition causing all sorts of comic chaos. I’m sure there’s more, but a brain can only hold so much. —Rod Lott

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