Today also marks the release of “Zombie Strippers,” whose title was probably also its pitch and its own self-contained marketing plan. The film, which stars former porn actress Jenna Jameson and Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund, has to earn bonus points for purportedly being based on Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.”

Jameson, who made her non-porn acting debut in the 1997 Howard Stern biopic “Private Parts,” talks about the film’s hidden political (yes!) agenda at San Francisco Chronicle: “‘I think that was the biggest draw for me,’ she says of writer-director Jay Lee’s unabashed Bush-bashing amid copious rending of clothing and flesh. ‘When I read the script, I thought it was brilliant. It’s funny. It’s a great way to pull people in and send them away with a message.'”

When is a zombie just a zombie, I ask you?

At Premiere, Glenn Kenny is inspired by Jameson’s career choice to write that “while recent advances in sexual frankness onscreen seem to be constantly bringing porn and mainstream entertainment closer and closer together, crossing over remains an elusive dream for performers who come up through the world of adult,” and take a closer look at several cases of porn actors trying to go mainstream, from Linda Lovelace to Traci Lords. But better still is the anecdote he follows the piece up with on his blog, a tale of how he, David Foster Wallace and two other colleagues headed out to Las Vegas in 1998 to cover the Adult Video News Awards, and how he ended the evening attempting to save the soul of the porn actress later known as Cheyenne Silver.

[Photo: Jameson in “Zombie Strippers,” Triumph Films, 2008]

+ Jenna Jameson stars in ‘Zombie Strippers’ (SF Chronicle)
+ From Porn To Mainstream: Can Jenna Pull It Off? (Premiere)
+ The Ballad of Cheyenne Silver (In the Company of Glenn)