Jenna Jameson in Zombie Strippers Courtesy of Triumph

READ MORE: Zombie Strippers review
READ MORE: From Porn To Mainstream: Can Jenna Pull It Off?

Here's the plot of Jay Lee's Zombie Strippers, such as it is: A soldier, infected by a virulent strain of Zombie-itis, is promptly transformed into a bloodthirsty undead killer. He escapes from a government lab, takes shelter in a low-rent illegal stripper joint called the Rhino Club and claims his first victim. The unfortunate target — no stranger to being someone's first — is Rhino's star pole dancer, Kat. As the virus pulsates through her veins, all Kat wants to do is dance. Raging with feline strength and energy, she gyrates and writhes her body in ways the clientele have never seen. Enamored, her adoring male fans shower her with greenbacks (and even a personal check). But it isn't long before she begins to pull "lucky" members of the audience backstage. No one seems to notice that they never return. Other dancers become infected or submit voluntarily to infection so that they can "conform" and cash in on Kat's success. But, before long, a crack military team is deployed to the club to wipe out the zombie strippers and their caged clientele.

One of the few strippers who remain uninfected is Jessy, a Christian country bumpkin who has come to the city to make money to pay for her Nana's colostomy. She and her boyfriend lock themselves away in a room in the club and when two military special agents burst into their hiding place, they have to prove that they're not undead. Says Agent Oxnard (Travis Wood), toothpick between his teeth, "Convince me! Say something human! Make it good. In a deeply ontological way." It was precisely such comically erudite dialogue interspersed with the zombie action that convinced porn star Jenna Jameson and horror icon Robert Englund that this was a project they wanted to be a part of. Director Jay Lee cites Sartre and Camus and references fatalism, hypocrisy and fanaticism throughout the script, but on set the political undertone and subtext of the film became secondary to the actors just having fun with it.

Zombie Strippers Courtesy of Triumph

Travis Wood, who had worked with Lee before on his previous film The Slaughter, was given freedom to develop his own character. Working off the basic description of "a burly guy with a Southern twang and toothpick," he was put through martial arts lessons and trained at the L.A. Gun Club, at Lee's suggestion. "He told us to play it straight and we'd get the laughs," says Wood. "He's kind of the unassuming smart guy in the corner you don't really pay attention to. But when we were shooting, he stuck to his script, and there really wasn't any pressure to focus on the political aspects of the film. 'Let's focus on the absurdity of it,' he said. 'Play it straight and let's have fun.'"

Speaking exclusively to Premiere, Lee chats about his struggle to get his first studio feature film into theaters, how he found inspiration for Zombie Strippers in the Theater of the Absurd and why watching Jenna Jameson perform her first pole dance was comparable to George Lucas hearing the Star Wars theme tune for the first time. Fans of both Vivid adult films and blood splattered horror schlock will surely identify.

This is the fourth film that you've written and the fifth film that you've directed. Does it get any easier for you?
No, actually it doesn't. It's pretty funny. This is the first film that my sister, who is a producer, and I have worked on with a studio. Although we had almost no budget before and we were scrambling to sell the film afterwards, we actually always had complete creative freedom. So the film we finished was always the film we intended to make. Definitely the hardest thing about this film was that The Man was watching over us the whole time and telling us what to do at some points. Our shooting days were pretty free and clear. They gave us free reign for that. But when it came to the final edit, they were thinking more about WalMart and Blockbuster and getting an R rating while we're thinking about trying to make a difference.

The film is loosely based on the Theatre of the Absurd play, Rhinoceros, by Eugene Ionesco. Was this your starting point or just something that you referenced?
Oh, it was the starting point. The film actually started as a joke. We were shooting The Slaughter, which was a shamelessly marketable horror film, and my joke was: "At least we're not shooting something like Zombie Strippers!" And that got a laugh on the three times I said it. And as I said it, I thought: "That's our next film." But... personally I knew I would have to do something else with that for my own benefit. So thinking about how absurd [the idea] of Zombie Strippers was, the absurdity of Rhinoceros was the perfect template to use.