Can cult movies fuel creative choices on the Strip?

Still basking in the Halloween glow? Let's talk about a couple of deliriouslyscary movies: "The Evil Dead" and "Showgirls."

Why? Because last week's column covered all the reasons why it's so hard for lower-budget Las Vegas shows to offer anything more creative than topless cabaret. But just as Broadway seems to pull every new musical from a movie, the cult fan base of these two flicks sustains one spoof against impossible odds and gives the second a serious shot at joining it on the Strip.

With its willfully bad aesthetic, a young pro-am cast and buckets of stage blood, "Evil Dead The Musical" was a serious longshot to compete with the big boys on the Strip. Especially when the only time slot available at the V Theater was 10 p.m. Fridays and 11:30 p.m. Saturdays.

But the campy musical has been there three years. It helps to have a break-even so low, producer-director Sirc Michaels calls attendance of 150 to 200 people "insanely good."

But even a Little Show That Could can always use a little extra coal in its engine. A new TV show couldn't arrive at a better time for "Evil Dead The Musical" as it prepares to close out at the V Theater on Nov. 28 and reopen at the Tommy Wind Theater on Dec. 1.

"Ash vs. Evil Dead" debuted this weekend on Starz, bringing original "Evil Dead" director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell back to reboot the franchise. Great timing for a show that found its own road to become more of a new "Rocky Horror Show," but still pulls in as many (more?) fans of cult movies than of musical theater.

The timing is "kind of weird, to be honest with you," Michaels says. "People are talking about (the TV show), going crazy about it, and it's ginned up the fan base again. It's kind of exciting. We just keep lucking into things."

"Luck" might not be the word most producers would apply to the Tommy Wind Theater, a freestanding venue set back from the Strip behind a Walgreens and Fatburger. In the case of financially embarrassed comedian Vinnie Favorito, it's the place you go when no one else will take you.

But Michaels' DIY attitude and guerilla marketing just might be the perfect match for a venue that's actually gorgeous inside. After all, it would be unbecoming of landlord magician Wind — who will perform at 5 p.m., giving "Dead" a primetime 7:30 p.m. berth — to be out on the sidewalk wearing a sandwich board, pointing the way ot the box office.

But rubber-masked sidewalk "zombies"? Totally fits the vibe of the show. Even if that doesn't happen, Michaels says walk-up or impulse sales haven't been a big factor so far. "If the venue you're in is not affecting your sales as such, then really what matters is the brand awareness."

The 7:30 p.m. time will be a test of whether an "Evil Dead" musical is really ready for prime-time when the $165 million "Ka" is just down the sidewalk. Michaels is optimistic that "regular people" will find it and spread the word. "It's not all f- bombs and zombies. We're only a late show because that's the time we had available."

Michaels says he feels better about the Wind venue than he would moving into a casino showroom with high rent and labor costs. No argument there from "Showgirls" producer Troy Heard, who learned a lot about those places from directing (but not producing) "Pawn Shop Live," a spoof which played two casinos with fatal strategic mistakes at each.

For one thing, the "Pawn Shop" show had no "workshop" or development curve before it was thrown in front of Golden Nugget audiences. Heard recently ran "Showgirls" for a month at the Onyx Theatre, rewriting it along the way.

But more important, Heard thinks he has the answer for the divide last week's column created between topless titillation and comedic theater: "A topless comedy show."

"That's what they would get with this show. A lot of laughs and the boobs," Heard promises. At the Onyx, "We turned the theater into Cheetah's for the strip club scene and gave out 'Nomi dollars' (named after the heroine) and told people to make it rain."

"Showgirls" is a parody of the once-villified, now beloved 1995 stinkbomb that was set and filmed in Las Vegas. Heard's is actually the third parody, after other producers had the same idea in Los Angeles (in drag) and off-Broadway (with Las Vegas Academy and UNLV grad April Kidwell starring).

"It was raunchy," Heard says of the Onyx run. "We had one of our patrons call it pornographic. The thing with 'Showgirls' is you either get it or you don't."

The latter would be the concern for the average tourist, but Heard says his challenge is not finding a big enough casino venue, but a small enough one.

That was the strategy for producer David Saxe when he created "Zombie Burlesque" for a 199-seat space inside the V Theater. The show's unpredictable success now has him preparing a revue for sometime in the winter which will combine sketch comedy —spoofs of Cirque du Soleil and sidewalk porn peddlers — with musical parody and burlesque.

So perhaps there is room for creative wit on the Strip after all. But it helps if you've seen the movie.

—Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Mikeweatherford