Rent Showgirls (1995)

From Trash to Cult Treasure - Showgirls review by griggs

Time has been kinder to Showgirls than the critics who first skewered it. What once seemed lurid trash now plays as sly, strange, and oddly compelling. It’s still a mess, but one with purpose, ambition, and a glittering visual confidence.

Paul Verhoeven directs with satirical bite, stripping Vegas to sequins and sleaze. Elizabeth Berkley’s Nomi—raw nerves and wild swings—seems unhinged at first, until you realise it’s exactly the right register for the world she inhabits. The excess—sex, dance, violence—pushes so far past taste it doubles back into a kind of artistry.

For all its bravado, the ending stumbles. After the spectacle, the final beat lands flat, as if the film couldn’t quite follow through. Still, reappraised, Showgirls is more than a camp curio: brash, uneven, unforgettable, and deserving of the cult it has earned.

A Poor, Exploitative Drama - Showgirls review by GI

A film very rooted in it's time, the mid 90s, so much so in fact that it hasn't aged well and can't remotely survive a re-evaluation nor be valued as a film that's 'so bad its good'. It's just a failure on so many levels. Firstly the themes that director Paul Verhoeven attempts around the exploitation of women in the world of Las Vegas entertainment, the links with prostitution and the accepted rape by celebrities is given the veneer of sordid soft pornography as he obviously relishes getting as much naked flesh on screen as he possibly can. All the characters are simply unspeakably horrid and especially the main character of Nomi played by Elizabeth Berkley, whose career this film no doubt ruined. Nomi is a former prostitute (although her past is held back as some sort of justified reveal near at the film's concluding scenes) who arrives in Las Vegas hoping to achieve fame as a showgirl dancer. She's clearly talented but is forced into lap dancing to earn a living eventually realising that the only way to the top is by being a nasty bitch. Berkley's performance is all anger and exaggerated movement making Nomi an unrealistic and petulant figure. The worst part is the viewer has no sympathy for her as she sulks, fights and manipulates her way to the starring role in the show. The rape sequence that is meant to be some peak of the journey loses any of it's intended impact because by the time it arrives you are in the position where you couldn't care what happens to anyone even though the the rape victim is the one character with any sort of morality. The vengeful woman sequence that immediately follows is almost laughable and certainly anti climatic. When you consider Verhoeven's major films, both his European and American, and those of writer Joe Eszterhas who penned this, you wonder what went so wrong. It has to be that the entire concept is ill thought out to the extent that Verhoeven's usual and successful excesses in violence have no part when it comes to female exploitation and misogyny in the American system where he relies on titillation as a means to push boundaries. This remains a poor film and whilst it will have its fans it cannot be remotely admired.

NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOWBUSINESS - Showgirls review by Frank Talker™

Director Paul VERHOEVEN does not have enough genuine feeling for women to make this movie work well much beyond its sexual-exploitation content despite decent performances and glossy production-values.

"Showgirls" should have been made by a woman (as Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple" [1985] should have) since that would almost certainly have meant less focus on the sexually-exploitive nature of Las Vegas and more on exploring the reasons for said exploitation; eg, Nevada as a metaphor for the generally-exploitive nature of White culture, for gynophobia and misogyny & for treating sex as a commodity rather than as a pleasure.

Elizabeth BERKLEY is a fine actress with a fierce, abrasive energy giving an often-angry performance but she, and every other performer, is somewhat lost in a typically un-empathetic script from Joe ESZTERHAS: Riddled with melodramatic clichés and a dislike for women which taints the entire enterprise. Yet, it's hard to think of anyone else with the requisite acting ability, well-honed dancing skills, looks good naked, has the sheer guts and, perhaps, desperation to even attempt the role.

"Showgirls" garnered star BERKLEY much vilification, bullying & blame for its controversial nature despite director VERHOEVEN taking responsibility for directing BERKLEY 'that way'. For a time, she faced total resistance from most film-makers and casting directors; reflecting the fact that the film deals with show-business sexism honestly; revealing the very Hollywood seaminess that the film tries to critique.

Moreover, the film's actual lack of eroticism is precisely the point being made about sexual exploitation: It's only erotic for the sexually-jaded. And it is to be lauded for that despite the director repeating the point with nudity that crosses-the-line between exploring exploitation and being just another example of it. The DVD version of this film is shorn of 17 seconds by the British film-censor (the Blu-ray is uncut); revealing the problem with the film's emphatic nudity: Sexual exploitation is the film's subject but ended-up becoming its main selling-point. In such a context, the sadistic gang-rape of the only sympathetic character in the film is sensationalised rather than being shown as tragically inevitable. The British censor had a point: Film directors need a tightrope-walker's skill to successfully-tread the fine-line between prurience and artistic endeavour - and VERHOEVEN partly failed here.

Although intended as a satire on the social propaganda of the American-dream, the screenwriter has no talent for comedy and the director somehow lost his sense of humour after his much better satirical work: "De Vierde Man" (1983), "RoboCop" (1987) & "Starship Troopers" (1997). The deliberate campness doesn't add much amusement unlike, say, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970) and the clever idea of having Elizabeth BERKLEY over-act as someone pulling out all of the stops for the fame at which the actress, herself, was trying to aim is drowned-out by the weakness of the satire on an entertainment-world populated by so many character-less ghouls and sexual parasites. Unfortunately, all of this leaves actress BERKLEY looking, herself, as morally-shallow as the character she is playing. A shame because she's actually rather good in a role that she clearly related-to on a personal level.

A mostly superficially-entertainment that would have been much better done as an old-fashioned, self-reflexive Hollywood musical - melodramatic, unsubtle & with better music; eg, "Singin' in the Rain" (1952). It would then have stood on much firmer serio-comic ground as a satire on Western patriarchy and the falsity of the American Dream that it clearly wanted to be, rather than the somewhat mediocre mélange of dramatic indecisiveness, soft-porn & execrable dialogue that it actually is.