This is how it goes… sometimes, you do something stupid, just for the story. You know it’s a bad idea, but you do it anyway, on the off chance that you’ll get an anecdote you can tell your friends. And no, I’m not proud of it, but that’s exactly why I rented Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven.
My history with the Showgirls franchise (yeah, people: it’s a franchise now) is probably the same as many people of my generation. Being a young lad of fifteen, deep into the throes of being fifteen, I had the same thought as most people when we all heard an NC-17 movie about strippers was coming out, starring an actress from a beloved and awful kids show I grew up watching:
“Dammit, why’d it have to be Jessie? Why not Kelly, or Lisa? Or, Tori? Hell, I’d take anyone other than Screech or Mister Belding!”
(“…Although, you know now that I think about it, I’m flexible on the ‘Mister Belding’ thing…”)
In any case, I can’t remember how I wound up seeing Showgirls, or even if I finished the whole thing. I just remember ending up more confused and annoyed than aroused. And with a preternatural fear of chafing, which I’m still dealing with. I haven’t gone back to rewatch it, for multiple reasons. Mainly because I love Twin Peaks and… Kyle MacLachlan… I mean, I can’t. I just can’t…
But also because of my low tolerance for camp. I’ve just never been able to get into that whole winkingly cheesy sort of aesthetic, and once something gets branded as a ‘camp classic’, I have a hard time getting myself motivated to watch it. But, on the other hand, I’m also a person who makes stunningly bad life choices, which brings us right back to Showgirls 2.
So, no, my motives were not pure here. I thought it would be simple: watch it, write up a review taking multiple cheap shots, and feel guilty about it. Unless people told me it was funny, in which case I would simply let the validation cancel out the guilt.
But, sometimes, miracles do happen, and I’m happy to say the joke was on me: Showgirls 2 is genuinely hilarious. I thought I was going to be laughing at it, and I wound up laughing with it. For its entire running time of two and a half hours.
And yes, you read that right. It’s a movie that’s almost a half hour longer than the original, done on a fraction of a fraction of the budget. It’s amateurish, and overlong, and more than somewhat sloppy, but it’s also very intentionally funny. And entertaining all the way through, which I was not expecting at all.
The film is written and directed by Rena Riffel, who played Penny Slot in the original film, and unsurprisingly moves up to the lead here. Penny’s a none-too-bright stripper who goes on an adventure from Las Vegas to L.A. to pursue her dream of becoming a dancer on the show ‘Star Dancers’. Hijinks, as you might imagine, ensue.
Granted, It starts off just as rough as you’d expect it to be. The five minute opening scene between Penny and her boyfriend Jimmy (played by Glenn Plummer, also returning from the first film) is full of stilted exposition, awkward acting, and lousy camerawork, to the point where I considered bailing out and never telling anyone about this, ever.
But the movie changed my mind in the very next scene, where Penny is pole dancing on the bar of an outdoor cafe. I could not tell you if she worked there, or if she was just hanging out, but really, what does it matter? Mere logic and reason are nothing but bugs, to be squashed under the nine inch stripper heels of entertainment.
They had me from the moment Penny sexily licked the stripper pole, and then immediately threw up.
That’s the thing: say what you will about the movie, but you can’t deny that Rena Riffel is at least partially in on the joke. She’s smart enough to know that she can’t compete with the budget and the boobs of the original, so she doubles down on what lovers of Showgirls are truly there for: the hyperbolic melodrama.
This movie is stuffed with incident, soap operatic antics, and arbitrary plot turns, filtered through a wonderfully weird sense of humor. Sometimes it’s cheesy, and sometimes it’s downright awful, but more than anything, I laughed. A lot.
Everybody seems to be having fun, which is key. No one is embarrassed to be there. Everyone seems to be having a lot of fun going over the top and being just plain goofy, and the sense of joy is infectious.
Shelley Michelle deserves a special shout-out as Katya, a Russian ballet diva who enters with the line “I speak English, I just prefer not to talk to white trash.” That line is the only time Michelle employs anything resembling a Russian accent, which would be weird if her character and personality didn’t completely change every ten minutes.
Danny Weber is also highly entertaining as Jeffrey, the concert violinist who is also a pimp, who sums himself up thusly: “I’m like a drive-thru, but instead of burgers, its whores they order with a side of fries and a soda!”
Seriously, man. How can you go wrong with characters like Diggs The Homeless Showboy, the friendly drag queen Magnolia Silver, Uber-Nana, and Daryl The Karate Moves Dancer? You can’t, that’s how.
And I’d like to give special notice to Paula Labaredes, playing Maria, the maid that Penny inexplicably hires after accidentally killing a Marilyn Monroe impersonator and disguising herself as a lady named Helga. (You know, as one does…)
Labaredes has what might be my favorite lines in a movie that is practically all good lines, when referring to snuff films: “No, it’s not tobacco! It’s very evil! I studied this in my detective classes that I’m taking!”
Yeah, so this is the part where I basically recite a bunch of lines that I love out of context in order to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with and take up precious, precious word count:
“I saw her do the shimmy extra hard! I saw it out of the corner of my eye!”
“I don’t know what’s worse: your dancing, or your cameltoe!”
“I like chinchilla! I like it better than mink, in my opinion!”
“It was an option at the morgue: burial, cremation, or ashes into a diamond.”
and finally, this deathless line from the talent coordinator for ‘Star Dancers’:
“I don’t care how old you are, I don’t care how young you are, as long as you roast! … Red hot magic heat!”
Hey, I don’t want to tell you how to run your sexy dance show, Mister Talent Coordinator, but… you should probably care how young they are…
All told, this was a great surprise. Going in, I was expecting to struggle to find anything decent to say about this movie. I was expecting a disaster, and now I’m fighting not to just right down every line I loved (and those that I quoted are the tip of the iceberg. The script has at least one keeper per minute); every loopy plot development (I didn’t even get into the evil cult stuff); every piece of incredibly bizarre musical choices (including the most tension-filled version of ‘Pop Goes The Weasel’ I’ve ever heard.)
So there you have it, against all odds: Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven comes highly recommended.
I’m just as surprised as you are…
