Speaking of shitty movies: SHOWGIRLS (spoilers)

[Otto]

I’d heard so much about this movie but had never seen it until last night.

Wow.

What a steaming pile of three-day-old crap this movie is! It doesn’t even qualify as camp. There are absolutely campy scenes (Nomi and Zach screwing under the dolphins, Ninja Nipples Nomi kicking the shit out of Andrew) but way too few and far between to be truly camp.

I don’t get the mixed messages the filmmakers were putting out. Nomi lies, cheats and batters her way into the starring role and there are no repurcussions. While Molly suffers a single moment of moral weakness (coming to the party despite her disapproval of Nomi’s conduct) and is punished with a gang rape.

And admittedly as a gay man I’m not the most interested in female nudity or girl-on-girl action but the supposedly hot scenes struck me as among the most un-erotic scenes I’ve ever viewed.

[vibrotronica]

So, you’ve got Showtime too, eh? Showgirls was on last night and the SO and I flipped back and forth between it and Pretty Woman. The verdict? The acting in Pretty Woman is slightly better, but Showgirls is funnier.

There are a lot of horrible things you can say about the movie, but Elizabeth Berkley’s utter lack of talent really stood out out for me. The sex scene in the pool is just…wrong. She’s thrashing around like a bass in the bottom of the boat! And what’s up with her makeup? She looks like a freakin’ clown!

However, there are sure to be Showgirls apologists along shortly who see it as brilliant parody. I’ll let them make their case on that point, but I will say that it does, to some extent, work on that level.

[moi]

Major agreement from me, Otto. It was several years after the movie came out when I finally gave in to watching it; in my defense, I knew it was going to be crappy, but I couldn’t believe that it was without campy quality. Also, I thought it might be part of the so-bad-it’s-fun canon.

Hah. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. There’s actually nothing to recommend this movie, nudity included. Also, I was quite bothered by the rape scene you mentioned; in a movie that seemed to have no gravity, I was really put off by the graphic nature of the rape scene. (What I mean to say is, brutal rape has been shown in other films, and it is disturbing. But the scene usually conveys something or is necessary to the plot. Not so here.)

And admittedly as a gay man I’m not the most interested in female nudity or girl-on-girl action but the supposedly hot scenes struck me as among the most un-erotic scenes I’ve ever viewed.

Ditto (well, except for the gay man bit). Even the most hound-dog-ish of my male friends said they movie was both unerotic and over-the-top, there’s so much T&A in the film that it quickly becomes meaningless. I honestly never knew he had a “too much point,” but clearly this was it.

[Otto]

@vibrotronica

So, you’ve got Showtime too, eh?

Actually I had taped it previously and watched it last night. The I finished watching it and turned off the VCR and THERE IT WAS AGAIN. It was like some nightmarish celluloid moebius strip.

[Lord_Ashtar]

@vibrotronica

However, there are sure to be Showgirls apologists along shortly who see it as brilliant parody. I’ll let them make their case on that point, but I will say that it does, to some extent, work on that level.

I’m not an apologist for this movie. I just wanted to say that it came out when I was in high school. All I knew was that it had lots and lots and lots and lots of naked women. Can’t say I cared about much else in the movie. In fact, I couldn’t even tell you what it was about, then or now.

[Tars_Tarkas]

I enjoyed this movie, but because it was bad, not for any good reason. And the nudity, though not sexy, was still nudity, and had the Saved by the Bell girl in it, so i was like “Dude!”
The movie itself plays out as a B movie, which is what it is. It may have higher production values, but it is still a hack B movie. It is not some great tribute to some theme involving symbolism and allegory or whatever a few people think. It is a masterpiece in so far as a masterful target for mocking from me and my friends, which gives it a place of honor.

[tremorviolet]

I caught this movie on VH1 a while back. (and, truthfully, I didn’t watch the whole thing 'cause it was both bad and boring) The funniest thing was the was they covered up all the nudity with Elizabeth Berkely (and others) wearing a digitally drawn-on bra for many scenes…

[gobear]

Criminy, I swear good camp is just wasted on some folks.

Yes, Showgirls is bad, but in a deliriously wonderful way. It’s a grindhouse exploitation movie with a multimillion dollar budget. It blends tacky Vegas glitz with hoary (and whorey) showbiz cliches, a great big heaving mass of silicone boobs, mascaraed eyelashes, and pained grimaces that pass as smiles.

I could envision Showgirls as a midnight movie (sigh, whatever happened to those?) shown to an audience of drag queens dressed like Nomi and Crystal, shouting out the lines with the characters–“It must be weird, not having anybody cum on you”–and throwing Doggie Chow at the screen.

[Ilsa_Lund]

@gobear

Criminy, I swear good camp is just wasted on some folks.

Yes, Showgirls is bad, but in a deliriously wonderful way. It’s a grindhouse exploitation movie with a multimillion dollar budget. It blends tacky Vegas glitz with hoary (and whorey) showbiz cliches, a great big heaving mass of silicone boobs, mascaraed eyelashes, and pained grimaces that pass as smiles.

I could envision Showgirls as a midnight movie (sigh, whatever happened to those?) shown to an audience of drag queens dressed like Nomi and Crystal, shouting out the lines with the characters–“It must be weird, not having anybody cum on you”–and throwing Doggie Chow at the screen.

Damn it, Otto! Why are you trying to usurp me!?!?! (;))

Where is lissener?

[International_Playboy]

I saw the movie in the theatre because of all the NC-17 hoopla about it back then. I remember thinking that the movie was nothing but a bad version of Flashdance (not that I liked Flashdance much either). Turns out the writer for Showgirls also wrote Flashdance.

I also remember being amazed with the dry humping, um I mean “lap dancing” that went on in the strip club in the movie. Walked into a place called “Cheetah’s” while on vacation in San Diego several years later (for the free cheeseburger lunch of course), where this kind of lap dancing was going on. Turns out, Cheetah’s is the sister club of one with the same name in Las Vegas, where many of the scenes in Showgirls were filmed.

Last year, both clubs were raided by the FBI. Seems the San Diego club was alleged to have bribed a council member to loosen the zoning laws in regards to those types of businesses. Following the story a bit in the papers, it seems the club was the only one featuring the humping and the other clubs were upset about them getting away with so much. Cheetah’s was alleged to have an insider with the vice squad, who would tip them off before an investigation, so they could clean up their act in time. Never have heard the end of the story on the raid, but the last time I checked, neither Cheetah’s San Diego or Las Vegas had a website up anymore.

[x27]

I think Paul Verhovin is pretty cool. He seems to be the only bearer of the classic Pulp torch, with erotic thrillers (Basic Instinct) sexy science fiction (Total Recall) and pure Peyton Place shlock, heavy on the Cheese (Showgirls). Plus he is from Holland and I feel he fills the ol’ European Decadence (heavy on the Cheese) lent to La La land B moviedom shoes just fine. And I like his science fiction above all others, I mean, Starship Troopers, Robocop and Total Recall are just good.

[Otto]

@gobear

Criminy, I swear good camp is just wasted on some folks.

But that’s precisely my point. Showgirls is not good camp. It has moments of high camp, like the two scenes I mentioned previously, but they simply aren’t enough to tip the movie from being plain bad to being deliciously bad.

[gobear]

Well, we just have differing views. For me, the audition scenes and the stage itself are worth buying the DVD for.

[quote]

[lissener]

Maybe you missed something . . .

Here’s a capsule review I wrote on Showgirls for an upcoming book I’m contributing to:

Showgirls
dir: Paul Verhoeven
1995

The time has come to reevaluate one of the most universally loathed films of the last decade. Showgirls is a wicked piece of satire that went over everyone’s head–including mine–on its first release in 1995. Being a committed Verhoeven fan, I went with higher expectations than the critical bandwagon had dictated. Nonetheless, I dutifully hated it. Cut to, five years later, and I come across a review in which the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum refers in an article wherein noted French director Jacques Rivette “[defends] Showgirls as the best and most personal of Verhoeven’s American films.” Intrigued, I donned a fake mustache and rented it. I was stunned. Stunned I tell you. Five years’ perspective made this second viewing an entirely new experience. Yes, Elizabeth Berkeley is awful. But we don’t object when John Waters uses bad actors intentionally. Perhaps that’s because Waters is ultimately very affectionate toward his characters, while Verhoeven clearly hates just about everyone. It’s crucial to Verhoeven’s vision that Berkeley be unable to convince us of her character’s humanity, because Nomi (“no me”?) is inhuman. In a deeply subversive twist on the Hollywood cliche of the stagestruck ingenue’s rise to stardom, Nomi finally achieves her full potential when she stops pretending to be human and embraces her inner monster. At the end of Showgirls, I had a mental image of Nomi shedding her showgirl skin to reveal a hideous monster, and this was confirmed for me by the song that played over the closing credits: Siouxsie Sioux singing “I Need a New Skin.” Please, don’t wait for the French to point out our myopia once again: see and reevaluate Showgirls as film that perfectly fulfills its every intention, unpalatable as those intentions may ultimately be.

Here’s a bio of Verhoeven I contributed to the same book.

Paul Verhoeven

Paul Verhoeven might the most controversial film director to achieve mainstream commercial success. Many serious critics consider him a dirty-minded hack; others, equally serious, would have you believe he’s the postmodern lovechild of Alfred Hitchcock and Jonathan Swift. Count me among the latter.

Paul Verhoeven was born July 18, 1938, in Amsterdam. (His childhood memories of Nazi occupation inform his work on many different levels.) While earning a doctorate in mathematics and physics, he became interested in making films. His later work as a documentary filmmaker for the Marine Film Service of the Royal Dutch Navy provided him with opportunities to learn the craft of filmmaking. After a stint in Dutch television, he began directing feature films in 1973 with “Business Is Business,” an awkward sex comedy with a prostitute as protagonist. (He would rarely–though with a couple notable exceptions–stray far from such subject matter as his skills matured and his themes solidified.) Over the next 12 years, Verhoeven became the Netherlands’ most successful director with the critically and commercially successful films “Turkish Delight,” “Keetje Tippel,” “Soldier of Orange,” and “Spetters,” culminating with the explicitly Hitchcockian and feverishly stylish thriller “The Fourth Man,” which features a beautician named Delilah (get it?) who has a frightening flair with scissors. The international (read: American) success of this film put Hollywood onto him, and all of his subsequent features have been American productions with wildly variable critical and commercial reception.

Like Hitchcock, Sirk, and Fassbinder, most of Verhoeven’s films are about the power of female sexuality. And, also like them, he seems by turns–and sometimes concurrently–fascinated and appalled by this awesome power; many of his heroines are more like superhuman fertility goddesses than like real human women. Explicitly or not, the central image of much of Verhoeven’s work is the Freudian concept of the vagina dentata. This combined with the other pillar of Verhoeven’s artistic vision–an overwhelming misanthropy (see childhood, Nazi occupation)–serves to make much of Verhoeven’s work problematic for many viewers. Like Lars Von Trier, the most frequent target of Verhoeven’s viciously gleeful anger is the film audience itself, an approach which warms very few cockles. In “Flesh and Blood” (1985), an abducted medieval maiden seizes control of her rapist by pretending to enjoy it; in his homage to Hitchcock, 1992’s “Basic Instinct,” and in the 1995 vicious satire “Showgirls” (a highly controversial film which some critics, myself included, consider Verhoeven’s masterpiece and one of the most grossly underappreciated films of all time), Verhoeven’s mythology of the vagina dentata is fully–almost literally–realized, with two of the fatale-est femmes since “Diabolique” or “Mademoiselle.” (In “Basic Instinct,” Verhoeven pays sly tribute to Sirk by casting Dorothy Malone, Oscar winner for Sirk’s “Written on the Wind” and an obvious foremother to “Showgirls”'s Nomi Malone, as murderer-mentor to Sharon Stone.)

In his science fiction movies, the femme fatale tends to be less in evidence (though never completely absent), but Verhoeven’s guiding misanthropy remains in the forefront. “Robocop” (1987) is a satire of corporate greed (as is “Showgirls,” on one of its many levels); but it’s also a special-effects thrill ride with lots of explosions. “Total Recall” (1990) is probably his most straightforward blockbuster, but with a story taken from Phillip K. Dick Verhoeven still manages to ridicule the government. “Starship Troopers” (1997) is a twisted homage to Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” and a vicious satire of jingoistic patriotism, but it’s also got some very cool giant bugs in it. “Hollow Man” (2000) is a meditation on voyeurism and personal responsibility, but it’s also a pretty cool special-effects vehicle about an invisible mad scientist.

Paul Verhoeven, by working well within the visual vocabulary of the Hollywood blockbuster but upending the audience’s expectations at every opportunity, is at the same time one of the most commercially polished and politically (and sexually) subversive directors working today.

Here’s this newspaper’s own Jonathan Rosenbaum (arguably one of the most respected movie critics in the world today) on Showgirls:

. . . it must be admitted that, as with Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers , which I also underrated initially, this movie has only improved with age–or maybe it’s just that viewers like me are only now catching up with the ideological ramifications of the cartoonlike characters. In this case, the degree to which Las Vegas (and by implication Hollywood) is viewed as the ultimate capitalist machine is an essential part of the poisonous package.

And this forum’s resident moviegeek, Cervaise, wrote a very clearheaded treatment of Verhoeven and Showgirls in a thread titled “Verhoeven reconsidered,” but the hamsters are obviously not fans: it no longer exists.

[Lamia]

I don’t know if this is true or not, but when I was doing research for my thesis (it was about Hollywood musicals), I came across an article that said that Showgirls was originally planned as a full-out musical. Singing strippers and everything! I’ve never seen the movie, but if it is intended as camp or satire then maybe more people would have “gotten” it if it had been a musical.

[Baldwin]

When I saw Showgirls, I “got” it. I understood that it was satire (even if the actress didn’t; she looks genuinely skanky-clueless to me). So what? It’s just skillful crap instead of clumsy crap. A waste of time, money and talent for the sake of some pretty obvious satirical points. Having an ironic subtext doesn’t make it worthwhile. I regret the time I spent watching a movie that was deliberately bad instead of watching one that was actually good. There’s an idea.

[Ilsa_Lund]

@lissener

Maybe you missed something . . .

Here’s a capsule review I wrote on Showgirls for an upcoming book I’m contributing to:

Here’s a bio of Verhoeven I contributed to the same book.

Here’s this newspaper’s own Jonathan Rosenbaum (arguably one of the most respected movie critics in the world today) on Showgirls:

And this forum’s resident moviegeek, Cervaise, wrote a very clearheaded treatment of Verhoeven and Showgirls in a thread titled “Verhoeven reconsidered,” but the hamsters are obviously not fans: it no longer exists.

Ahem…

[Otto]

<reads linked thread>

Hmm.

Well, the first thing that came to mind as I was wading through the first page of PH apologists was the Occam’s Razor comment that carrot had as it happens posted to page two. Sure, it’s possible that Showgirls was this thriple-reverse subversive prank masterpiece but the simpler explanation is it’s total shite.

Second thing that came to mind was a quote from Dennis Hensley’s book Screening Party which was in answer to another apologist for another shitty movie, Armageddon. In response to the claim that contrary to popular opinion, Armageddon actually made some sort of sense, one of Hensley’s characters asks “But if we don’t see it the first time, then it’s sort of failed, right? That’s like saying, ‘I’m going to be confusing and unclear and call that my style and think less of you if you don’t get it.’” Same thing applies to Showgirls. Either PH is such a genius that 99.9% of us can’t grasp what he’s doing (in which case he’s wasting his time and ours) or he’s a hack who couldn’t direct his way out of a paper bag.

[silenus]

@x27

And I like his science fiction above all others, I mean, Starship Troopers, Robocop and Total Recall are just good.

Well…one out of three, maybe. Robocop wasn’t totally sucky. The other two, however…
I’m with Otto on this one. No matter what the apologists write, Verhoven stinks.

[vibrotronica]

In this week’s Onion interview, writer Joe Eszterhas claims it was parody.

O: How do you feel about the fact that Showgirls has become such a cult film?

JE: From the beginning, when Paul [Verhoeven] and I went through the script, Paul laughed his head off, and so did I. I never understood from the beginning how lines like “How does it feel not to have anybody coming on you anymore?” weren’t funny. I went to see it three or four months after the release date, and it was packed with audiences that really laughed. I laughed, as well, and I laughed when I wrote those lines. You have no idea how many people have come up to me through the years and very quietly, nearly whispering, said “Loved Showgirls. Loved Showgirls.”