I haven't done one of these in a long while, mainly due to not really knowing what movies I should be covering and recently, I thought that maybe it shouldn't be limited to films on this series. This will be apparent with hopefully my next post, which will be a music album and a pretty notorious one at that. But we'll leave that for another day since we've got a really fun movie to talk about right now. That being the 1995 Paul Verhoeven directed, Joe Eszterhas penned Showgirls. I avoided this film for quite some time due to the amount of hate the film had garnered, yet I had grown a slight appreciation for the director recently, having fallen in love with Robocop and really enjoying Total Recall. So when I wrote my review for Interstellar a few weeks back, I decided that I'll put the movie on in the background which in hindsight ended up being a mistake since Showgirls is one of those movies where it is kind of a masterpiece in all of the wrong ways, the kind of movie where you expect everyone involve to never work in the film business, or at least not in any big budget system again. And I can see why when I look at it. It could almost draw a parallel to Troll 2 in it's incompetence (maybe not that bad but both movies are still enjoyable) with the acting just being so off in a way that is hard to explain. Elizabeth Berkley as Nomi Malone is the prime example of this, making her easily the best and worst thing about this movie. Part of that does come from how she is probably topless in 70% of the movie and she looks rather attractive minus the times where she just looks as if she's really trying way, way, way too hard. This being like the lap dance scene or the most ridiculous sex scene ever (with Agent Dale Cooper, of all people) that add to this aspect, where all of her movements are strange to look at, making them all the more captivating. Also have to give props to this movie for the phrase "Everybody got AIDS and shit."
But what about the plot of this movie? To put it simply, it follows Nomi Malone who hitchhikes to Las Vegas to make it big, going through many hardships all the while doing whatever she can to make it to the top. She gets abandoned at the start of the film, getting her feet back on track when she befriends Molly, who works with a show at the Stardust Casino called Goddess, which leads to Nomi being introduced to the lead of said show, Cristal Connors. Cristal does many things to humiliate Nomi due to her being a stripper and believing what she does is nothing more than prostitution, angering the latter every time it is brought up. The forms of humiliation include the earlier mentioned lap dance, the dance audition and an appearance at a boat trade show where Nomi is expected to offer herself up to whoever wants it. This leads Nomi to try and take the top spot from Cristal at any costs. That is kind of the most simple way I could put this without including a lot of other plot elements that come and go throughout. And again, the acting from everyone is so weird and off that I'm not sure whether it's intentionally bad or not. The dialogue doesn't help things at all as it reads like a gigantic melodrama which depending on who you hear it from, was Eszterhas' and Verhoeven's intention for the thing. I could see that maybe, due to how a lot of Verhoeven's American films are, including the two I mentioned in the beginning and from what I hear about Starship Troopers. I really don't know where else to go with this one other than if you haven't seen it and you like films that could be called "so bad they are good," watch this as soon as you can. I also heard about the commentary track of this is also worth a listen to and I'll catch it when I can but this movie was so much fun when I saw it that it might turn into a regular watch or at least I'll put it on when I'm doing something else so I can have it in the background.
I apologize for this being shorter than expected but I haven't done this series in a long while so I have to work on it a bit. Maybe my next one will be better and for those who are curious, I'll be covering the 2011 Lou Reed - Metallica collaboration Lulu.
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