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| Stripper Nomi (Elizabeth Berkeley) realizes her dream... by joining a glitzy Vegas topless revue. |
Release Date: Sept. 22, 1995. Running Time: 131 minutes. Screenplay: Joe Eszterhas. Producer: Alan Marshall, Charles Evans, Mario Kassar. Director: Paul Verhoeven.
THE PLOT:
Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) hitchhikes to Las Vegas for one reason: to dance. Unfortunately, the only place where she can find employment is Cheetah's, a topless club. Meanwhile, her roommate, Molly (Gina Ravera), works in costuming at the Stardust, whose show Goddess has attracted star Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon).
Cristal briefly meets Nomi backstage, where she is bitchy to her for no readily apparent reason. After Nomi snaps back, an intrigued Cristal gets her boyfriend, Zack (Kyle MacLachlan), the Stardust's entertainment director, to cast her in the chorus line for Goddess.
Nomi quickly discovers that her new job is mainly an opportunity for Cristal to torment and humiliate her. But Nomi hatches a scheme of her own to take the star down a peg while realizing her dreams in the process...
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| Cristal's obsession with Nomi has a sexual element. This is conveyed with all the subtlety you'd expect. |
CHARACTERS:
Nomi: Showgirls was meant to be a starmaking vehicle for Elizabeth Berkley, who was best known for the sitcom, Saved by the Bell. She would have been better off sticking with sitcoms. Berkley overacts to often hilarious effect - I have never seen anyone attack a box of French fries with such a degree of hostility and violence.
Director Paul Verhoeven has publicly taken responsibility, stating that Berkley gave him exactly the performance he wanted... something that I don't doubt for an instant. Still, while I'm sure Verhoeven wanted hilarious overacting, this is achievable without looking like a bad actor. Co-stars Gina Gershon and Kyle MacLachlan hit that mark in this very movie; Berkley does not.
Zack: Given the casting of Kyle MacLachlan, his crazy hair (which deserves separate billing of its own), and his even crazier eyes, I'd like to speculate that this is what "Bob" got up to in between the two Twin Peaks series. There's only one problem with this: Zack is kind of a wimp. He's a nonentity for the movie's first half, following Cristal's lead in all his major decisions and actions. Then Nomi seduces him, and he follows her lead. He's a sleaze, but he's a very weak one.
Cristal: As Nomi's showbiz nemesis, Gina Gershon puts on a cod-Southern accent that varies scene by scene: Sometimes it's a light twang, sometimes it's practically at Dolly Parton levels, and sometimes it isn't there at all. Cristal seems to get a sexual thrill from humiliating Nomi. When Nomi confronts her for enjoying making a display of her, Cristal responds, "Yeah darlin', I think I did." When Nomi tells her she hates her, she grins as she says, "I know." Gershon chomps down on all of this as if biting into a full dinner, absolutely nailing the "trashy fun" vibe that the film seems to be trying for.
James: His first attempt to pick up Nomi earns him a kick in the sensitive bits when he insults her dancing. He later criticizes her for being a topless dancer. Then he criticizes her for joining the Goddess chorus line, saying her previous job was at least "honest." Basically, if you assume that James is insulting Nomi or her decisions in any given scene, there's a pretty decent chance that you're right. Actor Glenn Plumber gets stuck with some of the film's worst lines, and he goes all-in on the delivery: "B***h, I'm tellin' you the TRUTH!" Uh-huh. Nomi, could you kick him again, please?
Al Torres: Robert Davi pops up a sleazebag in a 1990s movie. Who'd have thought? That said, Davi actually gives one of the film's best performances. Gina Gershon is good because she overacts in exactly the right way for the material; Robert Davi is good because he plays it straight. He has a particularly well-acted moment about thirty minutes in. Nomi gets $500 from Cristal for performing a lap dance on Zack, then leaves the club in disgust. Al seems legitimately confused. She just got $500 for something that usually earns far less. In his mind, she should be ecstatic. His reward for actually working as a character is to be brought back to deliver one of the movie's most notorious lines, which I won't repeat... but he does as well with it as anyone could, throwing the line away like a shrug.
Molly: The only genuinely likable character in the movie, well-played by Gina Ravera. Nomi is at her lowest point when Molly meets her, and Molly (inexplicably) gives her a place to stay until she's back on her feet. She is nothing but supportive right up until Nomi's behavior crosses the line into the criminal. She is also obsessed with a music star... which allows the movie to punish the one decent human being on display in its most spectacularly misjudged plot turn.
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| Sleazy club manager Al Torres delivers a particularly awful line. Actor Robert Davi does as well with it as was possible. |
"SAY SOMETHING NICE":
There are two schools of thought on Paul Verhoeven's helming of Showgirls. The first is that Verhoeven took this deeply seriously, and the result was a spectacular blunder. The second is that Verhoeven knew exactly what he was doing and actively encouraged making this film as tacky and over-the-top as it could get. I fall firmly into the latter camp, as it seems very in-character for the director who made RoboCop into a stealth satire and Starship Troopers into a stealth parody.
Whatever the case, there are moments in this film in which the sleaze, bad acting, and overall inanity transform into comedy gold. Take Elizabeth Berkeley’s "dancing," which vaguely looks as if she's managing to remain standing during a seizure. Or Gershon and Berkley chatting about the taste of puppy chow. Or the swimming pool sex scene, which I'll talk more about below. Or a bit near the end, in which Nomi turns into a Chuck Norris style martial artist.
Before the movie's release, some film journalists were wondering if Paul Verhoeven would deliver a 1990s version of Midnight Cowboy, making the "NC-17" rating respectable in the same way that Oscar winning film had done for the "X" rating in the late 1960s. In reality, Verhoeven made something much more fun: the mid-'90s answer to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
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| A sex scene in a swimming pool ends up resembling an exorcism. |
SO... WHAT WERE THEY ON?
The swimming pool sex scene between Elizabeth Berkley and Kyle MacLachlan is one of the most bizarre things I've seen in a major motion picture. Like much of the rest of the movie, it's hilarious. It's also truly, deeply weird, with Nomi flopping about like a dolphin while Zack just sort of holds onto her with an increasingly confused look on his face. Nothing about this resembles sex, but it may offer viewers a rare glimpse of an aquatic exorcism.
OTHER MUSINGS:
Paul Verhoeven has discussed wanting to capture something of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's classic, All About Eve, and Showgirls is just about the same. You know, if you replace the witty barbs and acid observations with a stream of profanities and inane blather... and if you make Eve impulsive and physically violent instead of expertly manipulative... and if you make Margo Channing not merely catty but directly abusive... and if you replace Mankiewicz's hyper-literate circle with a bunch of hormone-driven, drug-fueled morons... and if you throw in so much nudity that it ceases to titillate or, after a while, even register.
So... except for the basic plot outline, it's nothing like All About Eve. It's also nothing like a good movie at all. If you haven't seen Showgirls, I can confirm that it's every bit as terrible as you've heard. The story is a steady stream of basic showbiz clichés, fronting an unlikable lead, with awful dance sequences and even worse dialogue.
Let's take a quick look at the prologue. It's a dizzyingly awful introduction to both the story and Nomi as a character. We open with her hitchhiking to Vegas, declaring, "I'm gonna dance." When the driver who picked her up makes a clumsily boorish suggestion, she instantly pulls a switchblade. Never mind that nothing about his suggestion or demeanor suggests that he's thinking about forcing anything non-consensual.
When they reach Vegas, she leaves her suitcase in his cab, and she is actually surprised when he takes off with it. She responds reasonably: by attacking a random car. Fortunately, the car's owner is Molly, and she buys Nomi French fries (which, as noted, she attacks with hilarious violence), and then offers her a place to stay. Nomi's response is to wonder if Molly is hitting on her. All this takes place in the span of about six minutes, and it establishes Nomi as being unstable, potentially violent, and kind of stupid. Exactly none of these traits make me in any way invested in her journey. To add a cherry on top: If this entire sequence had been removed (along with the corresponding bookend), it wouldn't affect the rest of the movie at all!
As I've said, I'm convinced Verhoeven recognized this as what it was, and that he took the opportunity to make one of his stealth parodies out of it. Showgirls fails where RoboCop and Starship Troopers succeeded, in my opinion, because it doesn't work in its own genre first. If you somehow miss all the straight-faced comedy in the other two movies, they still work as solid action thrillers. Showgirls is very funny as a self-parody; but it's a truly terrible drama. I laughed a lot - but whenever I wasn't laughing at the movie, I was mostly just bored by it.
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| James hits on Nomi by insulting everything about her. Somehow, this ends up working. |
THE OTHER NOMINEES:
1995's Worst Picture nominees are unusual, in that I've only actually seen one of them. That one was Waterworld, Kevin Costner's post-apocalyptic action flick. I found it watchable, thanks in large part to Dennis Hopper's scenery chomping baddie. Costner, however, is at his most wooden, and he has zero screen chemistry with love interest Jeanne Tripplehorn.
I haven't seen any of the remaining three, and I have little wish to. Congo is a Michael Crichton thriller that was likely made to cash in on Jurassic Park. It managed to turn a profit, but it turns out that apes aren't worth the same box office as dinosaurs.
It's Pat was the umpteenth attempt to turn a Saturday Night Live sketch into a feature film. I never found Julia Sweeney's Pat funny even in sketch form, and 80 minutes of it sounds like torture. Based on its $60,000 box office take, I'm guessing I wasn't alone in that assessment.
Finally, The Scarlet Letter was a misfired attempt to adapt Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel about Puritan hypocrisy to the bigscreen. Added to Hawthorne's tale were explicit sex scenes, action pieces involving Native American tribes, and a completely changed ending. Which is to say... Yeah, they kept the title.
If I was to hazard a guess, It's Pat is likely both worse and less watchable than Showgirls - but I can't blame the Razzies for shirking an instantly forgotten nothing of a film in favor of an instantly notorious megabomb!
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| Sleazy villains Zack and Cristal eye up Nomi. |
OVERALL:
Showgirls is an awful movie with one saving grace: It's often very funny. True, I was laughing at the movie rather than with it. But I still laughed a lot.
That's not enough for me to recommend it, mind you. As a drama, Showgirls is terrible and often boring. But in the right frame of mind, and particularly in the company of some MST3K-literate friends, I could see it being a lot of fun.
Rating: Turkey.
Worst Picture - 1994: Color of Night
Worst Picture - 1996: Striptease
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