Movie reviews
A camp classic can only be made accidentally. If you try to make camp, you just end up with something smirky and self-protective. Nine years after its release, “Showgirls” is a camp masterpiece, a movie worth watching over and over again because it features not only one of the worst lead performances in film history, but one of the most astonishingly misguided. Elizabeth Berkley thought she was playing a sexy woman (nope), a good dancer (nope), a sympathetic character (nope), a determined artist (ha!) and an interesting, complex woman (uh, no). At the time, I considered “Showgirls” one of the worst films of 1995, but I don’t think I’ve watched any other 1995 release more than this one. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its amazing awfulness. It’s 131 minutes of jaw-droppingly tasteless, crazily written, badly acted, mind-bogglingly strange scenes, and as such it is never, ever dull.
Eventually the secret […] is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we’re back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.
(Ebert link via Defective Yeti)
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