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Released by: Wild Eye Releasing
Released on: September 17th, 2013.
Director: Rena Riffel
Cast: Glenn Plummer, Peter Stickles, Dewey Weber, Hoyt Richards Rena Riffel
Year: 2011
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The Movie:
Does the idea of two middle aged women with dyed blonde hair each chomping down on the opposite end of a boiled hot dog at the same time arouse you? What if those cougars were wearing sequins and feather boas respectively and hanging out in what looks like a suburban kitchen near fridge while this was going on? Hard yet? There's a blender on the counter and the one with the boa is brandishing some tongs… pretty hot stuff, right? As the promo art for this release asks… just how bad do you want it?
Rena Riffel may or may not think so, it's really hard to tell. Ms. Riffel is probably best known for appearing alongside Demi Moore in Striptease, in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and for a decent enough role in Paul Verhoven's Showgirls, which brings us to this picture, an unofficial sequel to that famous failure (no rightfully and understandably regarded as a bizarre cult classic). See there are rights issues and things to be dealt with when dealing with major studio properties, so it would seem that Riffel has just said, 'Huh, can't make another movie about Nomi Malone, so why not bring my character from the original back and cast me in the lead?' Evidently no one was around to stop her or try to talk her out of this, and the end result is… well, we'll get to that.
Penny (Rena Riffel) is a stripper in Las Vegas. She's not too happy that stardom has eluded her to this point in her career and she realizes that she's not getting any younger. Her relationship with a guy who makes t-shirts and sells drugs and rides skateboards named Jimmy (Glenn Plummer) is rocky at the best of times and she decides to relocate to Las Vegas in hopes of landing a part on a TV show called Star Dancer. After she moves, she changes her name to Helga and almost immediately hits it off with a fat cat named Godhardt (Peter Stickles) who is involved with another dancer, an older lady fading fast named Katya (Shelley Michelle). Penny now Helga sees opportunity with Godhardt, however, as he's got connections and could maybe help her climb the stairway to stardom. Click that link, it's great.
At any rate, Penny now Helga is pretty broke and so she has to turn tricks in order to feed herself, but soon enough she kinda-sorta gets a crack at a shot at a maybe-kinda potential TV gig. There's a problem though, and that problem is Katya and she's got no problem whatsoever putting down anyone who gets between her and her own dreams of stardom. If that weren't enough, it turns out that Godhart is not who he first appeared to be and that he's actually involved in a snuff movie ring! When her connection to Godhart brings her to the attention of the cops, Peggy now Helga finds herself accused of murder…
Owing more to Lynch than to Verhoeven, this two-hour and forty five minute long is an endurance test to be sure but for a certain kind of movie fan it's a test worth taking. It would seem that this started off with the best of intentions. Scripts were written and then passed along and then passed on and then written again and passed along again and tossed away again. There was a substantial amount of time dedicated to getting Showgirls 2 made properly, but obviously all of that blew away in a big stinky Hollywood rights fart leaving Riffel to go it alone and without much in the way of actual funding. Either out of necessity or ego (though likely a mix of both) she winds up not only starring in the movie but directing it, producing it and editing it too, making this a completely bizarre z-grade trash epic mixed with some sort of incomprehensible vanity project. It's something to see, that's for sure.
People dance in this movie for now reason. Women make out in a pool, sometimes they share erotic boiled hot dogs, other times they stare all wild eyed will sitting on a couch and enjoy some potato chips. Ladies glare at one another, then glare at some guys, drink some champagne and glare some more and Rena's character often winds up in fancy costumes presumably because Rena likes to wear fancy costumes. There's lots of nudity and lots of sequins and lots of heavy handed drama parlayed by a cast that does not know the meaning of the word subtlety but when characters do faux-lesbian stretches in the kitchen (lots happens in the kitchen, so on that level this movie is kind of like Things except with more lesbians and strippers) why should they need to?
The movie tries to capture a Lynchian style dreamy/nightmarish atmosphere but all of this is so over-exaggerated and done without any real sense of proper irony that the whole thing just winds up confusing. Occasionally awesome and always entertaining, but confusing. As all of this plays out, Riffel makes a near constant barrage of references to the first movie. There's sex in the pool and lots of 'Fuck you, fucker' style dialogue snips and of course, reusing some of the cast members who appeared alongside her in that picture and all of this makes it almost impossible to tell if she's spoofing the original or trying to coast on its infamy but when the movie starts tossing in its own potpourri of what the fuck, it really doesn't even matter what Riffel was trying to do. Some examples? Penny wears the ashes of her sister formed in to a diamond around her neck. She tells another character that she paid extra to have it done after the cremation. When she takes lessons from Katya to improve her dancing, it's suggested that she improve her moves by using her pussy. Another dancer complains about the difficulty of dancing with an erection and the Star Dancer scenes seems to take place entirely in a small black room (which doesn't look anything like a TV studio but in fact looks just like a small black room).
There are continuity errors galore. Audio goes in and out of synch and lines are misspoken with surprisingly regularity. A lot of this was very obviously done in one take, either out of intent to manufacture camp or out of financial necessity. Sometimes the movie says more with its strange stretches of silence than it does with its inane dialogue. Case in point, a scene where Penny and Katya are naked in the pool and decide to blow bubbles and then just stare longingly as the bubbles float away - it's like one of those gags from Family Guy in that it goes on and on to the point where it goes from amusing to annoying to somehow hilarious.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Showgirls 2 arrives on DVD looking about as good as it probably can in 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen. The extras reveal that this was shot over a period of time using 35mm, 8mm and digital video so the jumps and bumps in quality from on scene to the next can be a little jarring. The disc is well encoded though, not showing any nasty compression artifacts. Some shimmer is present but the picture is clean and colorful, if sometimes (Intentionally? Who the fuck knows!) soft looking.
The English language Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track on the disc is pretty decent. The score is nicely balanced and the dialogue is usually (though not always, some scenes are a bit muffled and fuzzy sounding) clear enough that you won't miss a single word of the countless insane passages delivered with ridiculous conviction by the cast. No hiss or distortion to note, all in all this sounds just fine.
The main extra on the disc is a full length commentary track from director and star Rena Riffel who seems surprisingly aware of what went wrong and what went right on this production. She's fairly critical of her editing skills and notes that the original cut ran over four hours. She talks up a few bits and pieces that were cut out and notes why they were removed and she expresses her admiration for everyone who helped out on the project. She also talks about how and why she wound up using the locations that are featured in the movie and how and why the various cast members affiliated with the project got in front of the camera.
Aside from that? A featurette labeled Lost & Found In The Land Of Showgirls is a weird bit of excised footage edited into a promo spot for Showgirls 2 1/2: Penny's Confession. Not sure what that's all about. We also get a six minute blooper reel and a music video containing far more boiling hot dogs than anyone probably expected. Menus and chapter stops are also included.
The Final Word:
Showgirls 2 is one of the most bizarre vanity projects you're ever likely to see on DVD. This is to Riffel what Paganinni was to Klaus Kinski by way of Tommy Wiseau's The Room. The very fact that this movie exists is strange enough but the finished product itself really needs to be seen to be believed. Throw logic and reason out the window and spend two and a half hours wallowing in the glammed out micro-budget insanity that is Showgirls 2. It's not even close to good, but there's truly nothing else like it.
Or maybe it works better in your imagination rather than in reality!!