Showgirls V.I.P Edition Gift Set
Picture: B- Sound: B- Extras: B+ Film: C-
It took a long time to for me to
get around to see Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 opus Showgirls, especially
because I wanted to wait until an NC-17 copy came along with the time and
opportunity to take it on. I am a fan
of Verhoeven and had to wonder how bad the film could be. Besides his usually impressive films made in
Holland, his American films have been underrated. Flesh + Blood (1985) has a deserved following, Robocop
(1987, reviewed uncut elsewhere on this site) is a genre classic, Total
Recall (1990) had its moments, Basic Instinct (1992) is a great
thriller uncut, Starship Troopers (1997) is a grand send-up of Fascism
and Hollow Man (2000) is a boldly fun Science Fiction Thriller despite
some plot problems.
What seems to turn off those who
dislike Verhoeven’s work is how nihilistic the characters are. What most of them do not know is that this
is a feature that is strictly a component of his American films. With that as a backing, it has made the more
intense situation of his characters that much more suspenseful. Note that critics have successfully shot
down all his post-Showgirls works successfully enough to undermine their
box office. This even helped to kill his
Crusades epic, even when Arnold Schwarzenegger was attached. What is interesting is how critics miss the
finer, better points of his films. So
the question was, did they do the same to Showgirls?
Well, no. After finally seeing the film in its uncut
glory, I realize what a fatal mistake Verhoeven had made. The nihilism is totally in tact as he tries
to show his idea of the dark side of America through Las Vegas, but the problem
is that even armed with a screenplay by the usually solid Joe Eszterhas,
another attackee who recently struck back in a tell-all book where he exposes
Hollywood and takes few prisoners. Too
bad the screenplay here was not as restrictive.
99.9% of all analysis of this
film has been form the film critic school of sarcasm. This review will now target the many actual mistakes in an effort
to make sure a film this bad may never happen again. One of the biggest mistakes that no one has pointed out is that
the film broke one sacred rule about making a film in Las Vegas. It forgot that Vegas IS always supposed to
be a character ion any film it appears in.
Even the highly corporatized Vegas remains so as Martin Scorsese’s Casino
proved the same year, a grossly underrated epic about greed and power that Showgirls
is light years away from. The throwaway
Mafia line in the beginning of Showgirls and no presence of organized
crime in the city further destroys its credibility.
Though MGM/UA made the film with
the now-defunct Carolco Pictures, MGM in Vegas (the same company) would not let
the film use its locations. That is a
bad sign. Then, the then-non-actor
Elizabeth Berkeley of a very bad teen TV show got the lead and could not carry
a line correctly, let alone a film. The
casting was for all the wrong reasons, and one could say youth appeal or her
then-good body was minimally sufficient, but it was far more complicated in a
way that hurt the film further. Like Caligula
(1980), the last epic of sexual excess that got an X-rating (NC-17 is the
modern equivalent), major names we could otherwise take seriously (Kyle
MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Robert Davi, Alan Rachins) show up and are beyond
wasted in films that could have killed their careers had they actually been
blamable for this mess. The unknowns
become automatically trivialized.
Berkeley plays Nomi (get to
“know me”?), who is going to be a dancer in this glamour town, though it is
never said that it might be more feasible now that corporations have turned
into the “family” town Casino concludes on showing us. Instead, she shows up and a series of bad
things happen to her automatically. She
lands up with a new female friend who lets her live with her, which becomes the
impetus for all the idiocy that follows.
Verhoeven and Eszterhas say they
went all over Vegas to “research” the film, but it seems they were not looking
for Vegas, but a way to justify their shallow tale. Sure, all the bad and ugly things that happen to women in the
film happen in Vegas everyday, but they happen everywhere else too. With Vegas as a trivialized backdrop instead
of a character, and the human characters the equivalent of sexless mannequins
(male or female, straight or gay), the film has set itself up for one of the
biggest falls in cinema history before the cameras even rolled. Even if Berkeley were the greatest actress
in film history at her peak when she made this, this would have still
been a great failure.
Verhoeven boldly abandoned his
aspirations and connections to Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma and Stanley
Kubrick at the worse possible time.
This is not a thriller per se, so giving it that atmosphere and
mistaking that for sex or sexy is an unbelievable miscalculation. Anything that could have been edgy is undermined
by all the mistakes noted. The nudity
is nothing new, the sexual dancing is a joke, especially because it is really
just a very watered-down variant of what was done in the Eszterhas-penned,
Adrian Lyne-directed Flashdance (1983), except now, the joy and grace
has been replaced with anger and very, very bad choreography. Unlike Flashdance, where Jennifer
Beals had to be doubled by a professional dancer, that is not necessary here
because no talent is necessary. It
makes you wonder what the audiences in this Vegas were paying their money for. I would have taken this more seriously if
some audience members walked out and even asked for their money back.
Along with the nihilism, there
is no depth to any of the characters or extras. Everyone talks AT each other throughout the over two hours this
takes to unfold. In Basic Instinct,
this works when it does because you do not know who is doing what or what will
happen next, part of which comes from its connection to Kubrick’s The
Shining (1980), as both have writers who become psycho-killers for
starters. The Kubrick equivalent for Showgirls
would be Lolita (1962, which Flashdance’s Lyne outright
remade). Nomi is not as underage, but
is supposedly innocent, but the character is written with too much flatness and
dumbness to ever suggest innocence.
It should be noted that Verhoeven
failed at such a thing before in Cathy Tippel (1975), which is pretty
much his poorest non-American film. As
for Eszterhas, his portrayal of women in Flashdance and the fate of
“woman who loves too much” Beals never truly finds liberation by the end of the
film. I never mind when Eszterhas is
politically incorrect about women, especially because he uses that to get the
goat of his audience, but in that film and here in Showgirls, it crosses
over into misogyny whether he likes it or not.
It backfires so much here that it becomes gay Camp fodder.
A bizarre exception comes
towards the end of the film when Nomi’s black friend meets a Michael Bolton
(remember him, the white guy who got caught plagiarizing real Soul music from a
deceased black male talent, then said he could not have possibly heard the song
because they had no such radio station where he grew up?) clone due to Nomi’s
sudden star status. Bolton II wants
Nomi’s “behind” as Nomi does the bait-and-switch to thank her friend for
helping her out. When the fan and star
get back to his room, he and two of his bodyguards beat her face up, then rape
her, which is violent. Actually more
sinister is how the sex is only suggested, actually trivializing the act in
some sick nihilistic way. Then, Bolton
II starts licking the blood off of her face!
The senselessly violent would be as laughable as similar scenes in I
Spit On Your Grave (1981) because that film was so amateurish. This is too professionally shot and
choreographed, so if the rest of the film was not bad enough, this sent the
critics over the edge and Verhoeven and Eszterhas only have themselves to thank
for that. If the idea was to offend the
way De Palma was to the ratings board with his once-X-rated 1984 opus Body
Double, they missed the point of that film too.
Of course, like I Spit On
Your Grave, we have the revenge for the “rape” sequence involving Nomi and
her especially painted fingernails. A
critic on the DVD says they take on a life of their own, but a better way to
put it is that they get better character development than the cast or
location. Was Nomi’s black friend
“punished” for liking a white man who acted or at least sang watered-down black
music? We never know what the music he
sings is and considering how bad the film gets we are better off, but the faint
suggestion is there. Most will want to
see Jonathan Kaplan’s The Accused (1988) to see how the subject of rape
is best handled with Kelly McGillis and Jodie Foster, who won an Academy Award
as the victim who fights back in a way that makes sense in a still-ahead of its
time film.
By the time this film was over,
I had learned nothing about Vegas, life, sex or the title performers. This was contractually to be a NC-17, a
Hollywood first, but its seemingly endless shortcomings put a black eye on the
rating and mature adult filmmaking for many years afterwards. No film with so much nudity, supposed sex
and sexual language ever misunderstood sex and human relations so miserably. Verhoeven should have went back to his filmmaking
roots, but American is too oversimplified to him on some levels, yet mistaking
that for the real America ultimately kills Showgirls. What should have been a landmark film on sex
and society is now an all-time joke, and Verhoeven and Eszterhas can only blame
each other.
As for the bigger stage numbers
in Vegas, they all look like “hell’s alley” and such sequences in the Sylvester
Stallone-directed Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive
(1983), which Paramount hoped would be the male Flashdance around the
same time. Instead, it was an even
bigger precursor to Showgirls.
It is Vincente Minnelli and his great Musical The Band Wagon
(1953), with Fred Astaire, who plays an older star who wants to try the
Broadway stage. One egomaniacal
producer wants him for a production of Faust that he sees as the future
of the Stage Musical, complete with a set made up to look like Hell and
flash-powder going off to the rhythm of the bad music. It is a disaster and his dancing co-star Cyd
Charisse joins him in knowing what a disaster it is. Since the 1980s, this disaster keeps happening in the kind of
cinema history no one wants to see repeat itself. The darkness/nudity combination was never impressive to begin
with and is now beyond cliché, and Minnelli and company knew this long before
it became commonplace. I would like to
think Showgirls would put a cinematic end to this, but with so many bad
Music videos form the Rock & Hip Hop genres, the nightmare is not over yet.
The anamorphically enhanced 2.35
X 1 image was shot by Verhoeven’s now-retired cinematographer Jost Vacano,
A.S.C., and this is easily his worst work.
He used Super 35 instead of real Panavision (or a great anamorphic
equivalent) and the look is lame, like a bad 1980s left over. The nudes look like death and the
constrictiveness of the shooting makes it more like a bad TV show or even some
XXX films or tapes. The quality here is
the usual troubles with Video Red and some finer details not clear. I doubt digital High Definition would make
this any better. The Dolby Digital 5.1
AC-3 mix is not too impressive, despite being a recent release and made
available in all three digital theatrical formats (Dolby, DTS, SDDS). The resulting presentation is as flat as the
film, and it wastes music by Prince when he was not Prince.
Extras on the DVD include the
trailer, a four-section diary to show how Verhoeven actually storyboarded some
of the sex/dancing sequences, an on-screen pop-up trivia feature, two sections
on how to lap dance with women from the real-life Scores club; one within the
film like the pop-ups and the other a five-minutes-long segment that taught
more about these dancers than all of Showgirls. The most amusing segment of all is the
informative audio commentary by David Schmader, who did not work on the film at
all, but has toured with the film narrating how extremely bad it really
is. M-G-M very wisely got him to do
this commentary to detail everything that went wrong. It is a Gay perspective as well, but there is more than enough
non-Gay facts and truths about how bad this film is and for someone who does
not know much about Verhoeven or Eszterhas, offers some excellent observations
about how plastic the film is. He
correctly states that it is amazing how everyone makes the worst possible
choice at every turn and that few films are this consistently bad. When your film gets this treatment, you know
what a bomb it is.
Finally, the V.I.P. box offers
oversized cards that suggest various games, specifically drinking games. You also get a blindfold, two shot glasses,
and a glossy poster of a nipple-prominent dancer. It is a game called “Pin The Pasties On The Showgirl” and two
pasties are included. Too bad so many
better films do not get such grand treatment.
Many filmmakers reach their
nadir, but few as badly as Verhoeven did on Showgirls. His films since have brought him back to
what he does best. With Eszterhas
retired, we can only hope Verhoeven has drained himself of all this idiocy and
never returns to this territory again.
One such celebrated ugliness is enough.
- Nicholas Sheffo
