Oprah Movie Club Pick for September: Showgirls

1995 stripper movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Nomi, a long-legged gal with a troubled past, hitches a ride to Las Vegas in order to become a showgirl. She makes some friends and pushes her way to the top, similarly to those ballerinas in that Black Swan movie.

I was a Saved by the Bell fan just like everybody else. Wait a second. Was? I was, am, and will always be a Saved by the Bell fan, or a Bell Head as we call ourselves. And like all the other teenage male Bell Heads, I wanted to everybody on the show naked, probably in this order: Jesse, Kelly, Mr. Belding, Lisa, Screech, everybody else. So this was a dream come true, an answer to our perverted prayers. You get to see every inch of Jesse in this movie. But you know what? It's too much. I almost can't believe I'm saying this, but this movie has almost too much nudity. After a while, she'd start to strip and I'd sigh and say, "Great. Elizabeth Berkley is stripping again." It probably doesn't help that she appears to have been made out of plastic in this movie. And either she's a terrible actor or this was just the wrong part for her or, most likely, a combination of those. I'm really not even sure if she can dance. She certainly moves around fast, especially during the scene where she's dancing with the black guy in the club and looks like she's having an epileptic fit. She spends as much of this movie angry as she does naked (sometimes she's naked and angry), and she really doesn't play angry very well, probably because she's just so polished. And I really never fully understand her motivation or why she's so angry and why she loses her temper so quickly and easily. I was probably distracted by all the nipples though. I'm just never able to buy "tough girl" with her. However, all the bad with her character and Berkley's performance is erased when you see her eat a hamburger at around the 45 minute mark. It's magical. "Thanks for the hamburger!" Right at the hour and thirty-four minute mark, there's some hamburger parallelism, and you can try your hardest to unravel the symbolic layers of that pair of hamburgers but you'll eventually give up and concentrate on where Henrietta Bazoom's boob-poppin'-out-of-dress-wardrobe-malfunction-complete-with-honking-sound-effect trick would fall in a list of Best Movie Moments Ever.

This movie isn't just bad; it's classically bad. At times, it nearly seems intentional, the kind of bad that can't happen accidentally. There's the guy in the truck who bookends Nomi's story, a character whose driving is almost as bad as his acting. I love how he says, "It was a bad idea!" Early in the movie, there's one of those big movie moments when Jesse runs across a street and nearly gets hit by several cars. It was right after some puking, puking that I think must have been inspired by the movie's score. Those kinds of moments usually happen at the ends of the movies. This one was at the five minute and forty second mark. Oh, and then again at six minutes and ten seconds. There's naked volcano dancing, a show that lasts about two minutes, after which the crowd--probably disappointed that they spent so much money to see a two-minute naked volcano dance--asked for an encore. There's a scene with a ring pop. There's the "I wanna see your ass" guy. There's a character who actually says, "You want a knuckle sandwich?" There's the red-headed Patrick Bristow who played the Wig Master in a Seinfeld episode who at first I thought was named Gay in this but who turned out to be Marty instead. His "THRUST IT! THRUST IT! THRUST IT! THRUST IT!" was award-worthy. There are monkeys, and then more monkeys, and then a sweet catfight in the vicinity of the monkeys. There's a doggy chow conversation and a tender moment involving cheese. Oh, and some great child acting."Can we see the  monkeys?" "Mommy, she said the f-word!" And, of course, a whole lot of nudity. And Kyle MacLachlan.

The best thing about it, for me at least, is that it seems to have been written by somebody not quite as talented as the folks who penned all those Saved by the Bell episodes. These lines are golden:

--"If it happens again, to anybody, you're going to jump to your conclusion. Without your golden parachute."
--"It must be weird not having anybody cum on you."
--Almost everything Henrietta Bazoom says. Her character might have broken a record for saying the word "twat" in one movie, by the way.
--Almost every conversation Jesse and her friend have but especially the one they have about chips and fingernails.
--"She wants to smile her snatch. She probably cut [the g-string] herself." There's no way I wrote that down right. Or did I?
--"Look at these tits. What are they--watermelons? This is a stage, not a patch."
--I want my nipples to press but I don't want them to look like they're levitatin'."

I'm sorry that this isn't more coherent, but the movie isn't all that coherent either. It is sleazy though. It's the type of movie you wouldn't want to eat off of. It's a ball of sleaze covered in three more layers of sleaze. But if nothing else, it does teach you an important lesson--you gotta gamble if you're gonna win. Not that it worked well for Elizabeth Berkley's career.