WEIRD STUFF :: The Making of SUPERNOVA (2000)

It's been almost two years since my last WEIRD STUFF entry -- I guess things have just been too normal around here. But there's something that's been on my mind for a while now - actually since late 2024, around the time Megalopolis began its limited theatrical run on limited screens and everyone began to revisit (and sometimes reevaluate) Francis Ford Coppola's filmography. I admit I took a glance at the master filmmaker's lineup; intellectually I already knew where the strong points were as well as the weaker areas (at least by my measure) and so I sorta shamelessly (but privately) tried to weigh his worth with movies of his I liked vs. movies I didn't. And in scrolling through his resume I found something of an anomaly - at least to me. 

When I bring you "weird stuff", sometimes it's personal information that you otherwise wouldn't have known. And sometimes it's information that's already public record but is entirely new to me... Like the fact that the 2000 Science Fiction farce Supernova is credited with three different directors: Walter Hill, Jack Sholder, and Francis Ford Coppola. 

If you're already aware of this, sorry to hit you with old news, but you could've alerted me to this bizarre factoid and all its sordid details. The script was reworked and built up and torn down and molested by a parade of screenwriters before it ended up in the hands of a reluctant Jack Sholder, who was immediately replaced by Walter Hill at the insistence of star James Spader. Hill shot the entire movie and previewed a final cut (minus FX shots) to a test audience - who hated it. Based on that, MGM then rehired Jack Sholder to do the whole reshoot and recut thing, which included adding new scenes, cutting old scenes, and replacing the music score entirely. 

By the time Sholder's polish was complete, MGM was under new management, and the new bosses didn't like Sholder's version either and so they pleaded with Walter Hill to return. Hill told them he'd need $5 million to make enough changes to salvage the film, and so they declined. Instead, they brought on Francis Ford Coppola who required only $1 million to perform yet another re-edit -- one that would include a truly bizarre and ambitious change to the movie, but ultimately made no difference whatsoever. It's tough to determine who had the idea or why it needed attention, but this final edit took an existing sex scene between Peter Facinelli and Robin Tunney and CGI'd it into a sex scene between James Spader and Angela Bassett - digitally swapping out the actors' faces and, of course, skin color. 

Honestly the only reason I ever took a mild interest in this movie was the potential possibility of an exposed Robin Tunney - which, in fact, there is, both in and out of the guise of Ms. Bassett. But that doesn't save the film. Its stellar cast, which also includes Lou Diamond Phillips and Robert Forster, can't even generate enough magic to make it excusable; if anything it makes it that much more embarrassing. I'm being more than fair by pointing out that I'm not really into this genre or subject matter even when it's at its best, but I'm perceptive enough to look past the silly spaceship premise and recognize it as the truly bad movie it is; not even really "so bad it's funny" but more like "so bad it's sad". 

The final directing credit landed on Walter Hill, under the pseudonym of Thomas Lee. And it was partly because of that pseudonym that I never gave the movie much more thought beyond the goofy garbage that it is, but now with all this added context and perspective I can't help but be a little curious to revisit it, and see if I can't recognize any shades of Freddy's Revenge, Southern Comfort, or The Conversation. Maybe if I reset my standards to be as high as possible then I can prompt some sorta physiological rush as my expectations plummet back to Earth. 

- Paul

It's time to let old things die

Hello. Yeah, it's been a while. Not much, how 'bout you? Have you stayed strong in the face of social discord or are you letting the bastards get you down? More importantly, is my cordiality transparent enough to set the tone of my tirade? Without rushing things I don't think it's too early to say it's been a long year that also seemed to go by too fast - but clearly nothing is good enough for people like me. We're always busy populating this site with the stuff we love and why we love it, because that's our general approach to life and what it has to offer... but along that journey there are distractions and aggravations and lamentations and any schlub with advice to spare will tell you that it's healthy to talk about those things. I would never burden or bore you with the battles of my own personal life - this blog is largely a land of Pop Culture. And Boy Howdy! there are some battles to be fought in that land! So pull up an ice block and lend an ear because there's been some awful developments in the world of Art & Entertainment and I don't want you to think I haven't noticed. 

Save for a new PTA or QT movie, I don't feel any excitement when I go to the theater anymore. Some would blame my age, I blame the mediocrity of the movies - but that's a separate argument. Point is, as usual, I was entirely lukewarm on the idea of seeing Joker: Folie à Deux; while I liked the first one as much as the people who liked it, I disliked it as much as the people who didn't. At the end of the day it's the only comic book character I truly like as portrayed by one of my favorite working actors, and from that angle it melded harmoniously enough to recommend. So I found myself in a theater watching the sequel, not because I sought it out, but because, like everything, it was just the next thing. And what I found was exactly how everyone describes it - that is, to say, the people who actually have the tools to describe it beyond a single four-letter word. And while most people's observations were accurate, that is not to say I digested it in the same way as them. 

Look I'm not gonna review the goddamn thing, I'm as sick of it as you are - but I will say that the fact that we're all sick of it is a problem in and of itself. Personally I can't think of any recent movies that generated this volume of discussion - the only problem was that the "discussion" was an avalanche of lowbrow toxicity and aimless frustration saturated in grammatical errors. One of the items on my very concise and coherent list of complaints I had about the 2019 film is how causally it would insult the intelligence of its audience. And then, in the purest and most maddening example of irony imaginable, the Sequel attempted some very mild abstractions and it went largely over the audience's head. Little to no surprise in a year that gave us the most generous helping of fan service to date. That's not based on some vague barometer - to my understanding, Marvel released a movie about Marvel movies. Conversely, Todd Phillips released a movie that grown men thought would turn them gay if they watched it. As much as people crave competition, there really wasn't one - not in this case. 

I thought Joker 2 was considerably better than the first one, but it was still just a B/B+. That's why I haven't gone on some aggressive defense jag in its honor; it's pretty good but not enough for me to go out ridin' fences. And that's where we're at: as Film Criticism was once as much of a valued art form as Film itself, the new adjacent form entertainment is audience reaction. There's always been published "audience polls" and such for as long as I've paid attention, but now we have all these shared public forums where brains of all sizes can flesh out the reasons for their trivial point systems. But even still it comes down to the numbers; a lengthy essay (or even a girthy paragraph) is no match for a cluster of stars or a drawing of a tomato. And these services are put in place for a reason: just as the snobs need validation from IndieWire and Sight and Sound to inform their preferences, the "real fans" need their voices to be heard, free of all that pretentious academia put forward by critics. "If critics don't like it, that probably means it's good." And therein lies the root of that great moronic divide that's always haunting me and that I'm always complaining about: the senseless belief that there's a difference between "good" movies and "entertaining" movies. And naturally, professional critics know what's "good", amirite folks?

I've watched many of you abandon social media as a whole, and while I'm sad to lose your company in the vacuum of cyberspace, I commend your discipline; the greatest tragedy we've come to realize is that communication on a global scale is apparently bad for our health. Oh well. Masochist that I am I still rattle around these URLs just so I can read it over and over again...

I lie awake in bed staring into the darkness, pitying these poor souls who're convinced there's an illusive list of criteria that only the greatest Cinema can possess. And then I, an accredited scholar of Film and Film Studies, find myself struggling to calculate what these unique attributes could possibly be. Every once in a while I'll still muster the energy to engage with these commoners to find out if they have any ideas as to what makes a quality picture, and the common response is simply a list of the duties performed on a basic film production. 

Indeed, movies do have these things - so much so that they've gone as far as to categorize them for award shows and the like. But there it is: films with "good editing, good writing, good cinematography, and good acting" are, by definition, objectively good. Seems so simple it's as though it was fabricated by the mental midgets who actually believe it; I'm no culinary expert but I can tell you food tastes better when the ingredients are really good. I'm also not a scientist but I believe matter is at its strongest when it contains elements. Point is, the film bros are adamant about that figmental weather gauge that's been calibrated by the uppity critics and out-of-touch filmmakers who they admire and respect - until they have a difference of opinion regarding the state of Modern Cinema. 

Quentin recently came under fire for his daring observation that there are simply too many remakes nowadays. That's right, the moviegoing public unanimously vilified a genuine Film Expert for expressing an interest in risk and originality; as if to say "no, we want more remakes". Coppola, Gilliam, Cronenberg, Villeneuve, Nolan, Ridley Scott, and Alejandro González Iñárritu have all joined Scorsese in publicly disparaging the Comic Book scene, and while the general response is "ok boomer, you don't know what good cinema is", the bootlickers don't have the resolve (or the cognitive dissonance) to defend these foul franchises; it's a wasteland of guilty pleasures, and when the fans are forced to confront that guilt, they lash out with the very ugliness that gives the World Wide Web its reputation. To agree with these giants of filmmaking (regardless of whenever their prime was) would be admitting to your own poor taste, but when we assert that "art has the potential to be objectively good and correct", to whom do we look to set the dial? And I have to assume that this idea of "correct" and "well-crafted" Cinema is gaining so much traction because of the ongoing decline in quality - but that statement in and of itself reveals my own subjectivity. I guess what I'm really pushing for is a truer and more nuanced appreciation from my peers; for people to have the bravery and ability to articulate their own feelings, rather than just being like "let someone else do it". If for no better reason than I'd personally like a better understanding as to why they keep droving out for this dreck. 

I've always remained publicly sensitive about people's love for a lotta these big franchise films - particularly the Comic Book Movies. My polite excuse has repeatedly been "I've not seen many of them so I can't judge either way", but I should think everyone's been perfectly able to see through my bullshit: I've got a pretty strong understanding of how studio marketing and movie trailers and posters work, and if they're doing their jobs adequately then I'm obviously not seeing these films on purpose. And I say it time and time again - I don't care that they're "Comic Book Movies"; I've seen protagonists and antagonists and explosions before so this isn't some entirely new genre that's too intelligent or innovative to grasp (or too dumb or disorienting to dismiss). But this sort of passionless platform of unrelatable characters and expository dialogue and pushbutton animation and an obnoxious preoccupation with continuity and cameos and mythology is never gonna be appealing to me -- and those are just the superficial elements; some years ago I was in a situation where there was a TV nearby with a Captain America movie playing on mute, and just watching the cutting and compositions of basic dialogue scenes and the transitions between them didn't feel too dissimilar to the countless student films I saw in school. Put differently, even when I disregard how vapid the content is, it's presented in a laughably amateurish way - and it's frustrating because I think even the fans know this to be true. 

My son recently said something along the lines of "I only wanna see movies I like with characters I know." While that 6-year-old mentality may be publicly prevalent, it takes the honesty of a child to say it out loud. My plan was to go to my grave having never watched Beetlejuice 2, but once he found out about its existence and release it would've been extremely petty of me to prevent him from seeing it. Miraculously, the movie made me feel as though I was a child again - specifically when I got an overwhelming urge to lie down in the aisle of the movie theater out of immense boredom. What a puerile miscarriage of a movie, but the otherwise agreeable audience reception was a loud indicator that microwaved leftovers will always be preferable to trying new things. Fans of Zack Snyder will tell you that one of his strengths is that his adaptations are "comic book accurate", as if to say he dares not deviate into anything too intensely original. It doesn't matter how godawful the STAR WARS prequels were, they'll remain superior to the Disney Sequels because they never colored outside the lines. And so I don't scratch my head in bewilderment when whatever remaining theaters that are left are filled with video game graphics and ramshackle nostalgia; You get what you fucking deserve! 

We were only a few years into the new millennium when it had occurred to me that it'd been a long time since I'd seen a truly original movie - like, roughly since the beginning of the 2000s; big or small, Indie or Hollywood, the heavy rotation of life-changing Cinema had seemed to come to a halt. That was it? 18 years old and I'd completely lost touch with what was new and exciting? I'd like to say it was a slump, but here we are, and there doesn't seem to be any Enlightenment or Renaissance creeping up on us any time soon, and it all coincides with that Y2K changeover. And it's not hard to understand why...

This century began with a sorta "Four Horseman of the Apocalypse": STAR WARS, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Spider-Man. You could argue there were more, or implicate others, or defend these because you liked them, but it is undeniable that they've cast an everlasting shadow from under which we will not escape for a long time; nearly 25 years of pronounced cultural stagnation and it is in no doubt due largely to the success of these four conglomerates of Fantasy and Action that captured the hearts and minds of audiences and producers alike. Nearly all media has attempted to match the model created by these four installments and the only new measures we've seen is some lateral expansion: nothing new, just more of this. The urge to binge multiplied by the advent of streaming; radio serials updated for lower standards and shorter attention spans. TikTok and all that. In an age where we spend $400 million on shaky special effects and turn on subtitles just for fun, visuals and writing seem to be weaker than ever. The storytelling angle has become the singular focus, and the central theme of these stories are all the same: "Here's stuff you remember from before, and be sure to stick around for more." They've become a goddamn bingo card; a system of checks and balances to ensure absolute satisfaction with no loose ends. It's become STAR WARS Prequels x 1000. In 2023, Fangoria Editor-in-chief Phil Nobile Jr. observed the following: 

Of course he's able to melt down my entire complaint into a single paragraph - and it so eloquently explains why a moviegoing public can't cope with a shirtless Kylo Ren or a singing Joker -- "this absolutely does not fall in line with what I'm used to!" With this kind of dogmatic approach to art - to anything - how could there ever be progress? Here, I'll make an objective observation: 20th Century Cinema was better. Everyone goddamn knows it, otherwise they wouldn't keep tryna remake the shit every two bastard weeks. Danny DeVito once said something to the effect of "Hollywood will keep trying until they get it wrong." Can't really say it's their fault - the public fights originality in every possible form; for better or worse we got a wholly original Barbie doll movie and the common reaction was "Welp, Hollywood has officially run outta idea." 

People don't just form their opinions based on the consensus, they hijack it entirely; we know what all the good and bad movies are because those areas have been drilled, and the emergence of social media keeps us up to date on the new stuff. I used to love riding on the bandwagon and sharing the excitement and adoration of The New Big Thing but I didn't come to make friends - my connection to the movie came first, and if it didn't happen for me then that was my cross to bear. It's difficult to share a conflicting point of view nowadays without fear of coming across as attention-seeking or problematic, so the leading lesson I'm preaching is this: dare to feel what you feel without bending to unanimity or licking boot, and make sure you have the vocabulary and the valor to back it up -- because they'll come for you.

- Paul

THE PHANTOM MENACE - 25 Years Later

A long time ago, just a couple miles from my house, I attended the matinee showing of STAR WARS Episode I: The Phantom Menace on the afternoon of Wednesday May 19, 1999. For the first time ever I bought my ticket days in advance so that I could skip school to witness the earliest possible showing of the first new STAR WARS movie since I was 3 months old. I attended alone but the electricity of the crowd created a palpable camaraderie; we were all there for the same thing, we all loved STAR WARS, we all wanted to see that double lightsaber, and we all knew nothing could ever be sillier than the Ewoks. 

If you were alive and aware in '99 you remember what it was like. You didn't have to be into STAR WARS or even see this movie to feel the force of the ad campaign that dominated every corner of consumerism. Outside of the licensed toys there was fast food, clothing, toiletries, trading cards, costumes, personalized checks, and anything else onto which you could stamp a picture of Natalie Portman's kabuki face; every magazine had a cover story, every cable network had a special. Weird Al had a song. I was 16 and from my perspective everyone everywhere was excited and optimistic and happily got caught up in the hype. And then everyone saw it. 

I thought I maybe kinda liked it, that was my initial takeaway. I knew I felt let down somehow, but my anticipation for it clouded any articulate assessment. That + the movie itself was so dry and convoluted that it made it harder to point to specific things to criticize. I knew I was mostly on the same page as everybody else about Jar Jar and the pace and the performances and the political plot, but unlike every other STAR WARS fan who ever lived, I was prepared and capable to accept the movie as is - and what it is is a clunky Science Fiction flick that feels nothing like STAR WARS. I went back to see it two more times (which is something I just used to do with anything I found even remotely interesting) and during the third viewing I was overcome with a debilitating headache which even then I took as a sign that my body was rejecting my efforts to grasp onto any hope I had of actually enjoying this movie. 

And in the following years there were two more prequels and it became evident that Jar Jar Binks was the least of our problems as the sobering truth came into focus that this is just how these movies are: stilted and flavorless and overly calculated to the point that it wasn't much more than a graphic depiction of a spreadsheet consisting of plot points and political science. I revisit them for the moments that are good, which are usually superficial action sequences free of their designated context, but the space around them is ultimately "cringe." But now, so many years later, Phantom Menace still stands tall as a unique and bizarre experience, but also film. 

On May 4th (as in May the Fourth) of this year, I revisited Episode I - not just the movie, but the movie theater in which I first viewed it -- this time with a 5-year-old child who enjoys STAR WARS just as much as I, and is just as apathetic towards the Prequels as I. It's been quite the sociological survey since he got into these films a little over a year ago: without subjective influence, he loves the Original Trilogy, he likes the Sequel Trilogy, and he's mostly unenthused with the Prequels. I suppose despite George's insistence that these movies are made for indifferent children, quality prevails.

I've revisited many movies on The Big Screen that I initially or eventually came to know best on home video and always found that the theater experience demanded fresh attention. Such was not the case with the Menace - it was the same tedious slog it's always been, but I think I finally hooked into its peculiar rhythms and I actually took interest in what is basically the bulk of the movie: the Tatooine sequence. 

At a running time of over 45 minutes the entire "getting to know Anakin" portion of the film is the film, and it's coherent, it's logical, and most often it's quite engaging, and while there's no spike in skillfulness when it comes to the dialogue, it unfolds in a way that's almost as fun as a STAR WARS movie. Even the pod race (which is a fantastic achievement in cinematography, editing, effects, and sound) acts as an adequate finale to this otherwise cohesive "Part One", but instead the movie continues into the next drag of an act involving the Jedi Council and Senatorial debates. 

Man does it get tedious. It's always during this stretch that the weight of the incompetence of this movie really hits me. After the pod race was over my son became so bored he started asking me questions about the architecture of the theater we were in, and I was happy to participate. Granted we'd both seen the film many times, but the sound and vision of the theater environment still isn't strong enough to pull in my attention during the slower bits, and that's mostly due to the fact that the movie is empty of enough nuance or depth to make you wanna look any deeper. Having said that, the prequels are famous for "Easter eggs" and little peripheral animations for the fans, and watching it again on a bigger screen for the first time in a quarter century I took extra special notice of Jabba the Hutt's slave girls. 

Off to the left in the shadows is Diva Funquita and all the way to the right in the famous gold bikini is Diva Shaliqua. For me this is the biggest kinda fan service, as the trollops of Jabba's Palace in Return of the Jedi are one of the most vivd flagships of my own personal nostalgia (Leia included). The biggest strength of the Prequels is that they're populated with minor characters with no dialogue but full-fledged backstories and elaborate names. Characters like them had more of an existence in the Expanded Universe books and animated series and other spinoffs, but mostly it was to sell toys. You're not a real collector unless you have a Graxol Kelvyyn! 

George's backend came largely from the merchandise, and so more characters = more cash. Once he stepped away Disney didn't follow this model so the sequels were a bit more sparse in characters and weapons and vehicles and I believe they suffered a bit for that. But otherwise, the Disney trilogy has only magnified how cold and rigid and boring these Prequels are - to me at least. In recent years a lotta folks have "come around" on the Prequels, succumbing to the notion that not only are they "not that bad" but "actually pretty good." Poor deluded creatures. These are the kindsa people who give nostalgia a bad name - they're no better than the Boomers. Or, perhaps they actually did like these movies all along and were afraid to admit it. Or, maybe the quality of modern popular movies has dipped so far beneath The Phantom Menace that it now seems superior. 

At any rate, I sat in a mostly-empty theater on a Saturday afternoon in 2024 to rewatch the highest grossing picture of 1999, so apparently everyone cared even less than I. Needless to say the experience was very different than the first time I was there - especially in the moments before anyone there had actually seen the film and there was an audible shriek of excitement when the "long time ago" title card came up. And therein lies its own incredibly layered nostalgia: me, here, reminiscing about a 25 year old movie that sparked a collective reminiscence for a then-22 year old movie. But the biggest nostalgic thing for me is that sense of unity; everyone was openly let down with the Prequels in some respect, but we all took the ride together, and the fanboys remained on the fringes of the internet's infancy. Today we drown in STAR WARS fatigue, and social media is there to remind us of the toxicity of fandom. In hindsight, much of the recent STAR WARS "content" has been superior to George's tiresome origin trilogy in many ways, but his Prequels at least felt fresh, original, experimental. They were spaced out with legitimate anticipation. They were, and continue to be, unique - for better for worse. Hot drive-thru cuisine is sometimes better than reheated leftovers. 

- Paul

I always had a thing for you, Sid

The 90s is famous for horror, but not with me. It is the absolute worst decade for the genre, and is filled with the worst writing, crustiest acting, and the shittiest everything. I remember when Scream came out. It was the event of 7th grade. You were lucky if you had a cool parent that would take you, or a friend's Mom that would do the ticket swap once you crossed the ticket-take threshold. I couldn't wait. Being an enormous A Nightmare on Elm Street fan, I was pumped. This was said to be Wes Craven's ultimate return to horror - a gore fest teen murder mystery, with a comedic edge. I was sold. 

   The opening scene sucked me right in. Being a lifelong lover of E.T., I loved seeing Drew Barrymore get gutted and hung from a tree. She had the right scream. The entire scene is tense and promised a frightening and wild ride. You even feel sadness for the parents that discover her. It's traumatizing.

   Sadly, the movie comes to a screeching halt there. Powered by a boring script by none other than Dawson's Creek helmer, Kevin Williamson, we are left with just over an hour of running around and obvious jump scares. The shocking plot twist at the end is obvious, cheesy, and gives fright a bad name. 

In fact, the only thing going for the remaining runtime were Rose McGowan's amazing melons. It's actually what got me to manipulate my way back to see it in the theater an additional two more times. Those hard nips behind that neon green top were worth sitting through that tripe. At that tender age, you takes what you can gets. 

   Fast forward to the present, and in the spirit of our special theme, and revisiting the garbage released back then, we kicked off our season with watching this bore. I very much felt like I was watching it with fresh eyes, especially since I didn't have to wait for Rose's breasts, as there have been other features subsequently containing the duo, and having grown up with hardcore pornography. 

 

   Drew's opening sequence held up, and I still felt tense when she almost gets away, as her parents arrive home. While the screenplay was more dreadful than ever, there were performances that made me smile. Henry Winkler, in his small role as the Woodsboro High School Principal, was perfect. He was very effective in attempting to mislead the audience into thinking he was the killer; taunting his students with a pair of scissors after they pranked their school in garish costumes. And while Billy, played by Skeet Ulrich, is supposed to be the handsome ultimate bad boy lead that we are supposed love, I was taken with Stu, played by Matthew Lillard. So few movies actually make me laugh out loud, and his whole performance at the final showdown had me in stitches. Playing insane sounds easy, but it can be overdone, and he does it perfectly: frothing, drooling, and nearly sexually assaulting the heroine in his final moments. 

   Overall, I liked it better. Still not list-worthy as one of the best ever, but it's a little fun. A perfect popcorn movie, where you can be on your phone and you're not missing anything. 

- Jess

Here's Bubbles! Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of SHOWGIRLS 2

Wow! Where does the time go? Can you believe it's been 10 years since we've inherited the precooked canned meat product that is Showgirls 2: Penny's From Heaven? Me neither. And so, I'm commemorating this double-digit anniversary with some superficial meanderings mixed with deep thoughts regarding this largely overlooked sequel. Some of you may ask "Why?" Some of you may even ask "Huh?" Don't worry, I'll tell you -- but you might not like the answers.

Actually, there's only ever been one singular answer, and that's Rena Riffel. 

I can't give you a number of the countless character actors I've charted over the years, cheering them on as they'd crop up in bigger & better things, building their resumes, flexing their range, watching their star rise. Ms. Riffel was one such performer. From an adolescent point of view, she was difficult to miss in stuff like Showgirls, Striptease, and Married... With Children (credited, predictably, as Stripper #1). In Candyman 3: Day of the Dead, she smears honey on her bare breasts before being devoured by the slasher's swarms of vengeful bees, and I thought "Ahh, this is it. She's made it." I thought playing a victim in one of the few (but better) 90s Horror franchises was a sealed deal for mainstream stardom -- and for a minute, it kinda was; her brief but prominent scene in Mulholland Drive was, for me, as startling and confounding as anything else in that movie. Lynch's ode to the horrors of Hollywood - beautifully personified right there on the screen by a struggling actress who'd relied on her sexuality to make it to this very moment.

And so she was, and will now and forever be the bright red cherry atop your Criterion collection, and mine. And then that was kinda it for a while; not a lot worth mentioning outside of some weird TV stuff and tame DTV Erotica that was more dull than sexy. But it didn't matter, because all the while Rena was spearheading a Kickstarter campaign to produce a sorta spinoff feature about her character from Showgirls - then simply titled Showgirl. I got word of it directly through her own YouTube channel back in 2009, and I was elated to find that not only was she still an artist, but that she was entirely in control of her art, and that this was the project she chose. I followed its progress very closely until things seemed to go quiet, and I thought it'd died. Then, miraculously, years later, I came across the finished product on DVD - and as that journey ended, a new one began...

Showgirls 2: Penny's From Heaven (note the clever contraction) was written, produced, edited, and directed by Rena Riffel, starring Rena Riffel, released by Rena Riffel Films. On a budget of $30,000, this barely-supporting actress pulled together a passion project based on one of the most notorious turkeys of the 20th century, shamelessly (though admirably) reprising and repositioning her character into the lead.

The most readily-available comparison I can make is to Bill Hinzman's Flesh Eater: a movie he himself cowrote, produced, edited, and directed as a vehicle to return in his role as Zombie #1 from 1968's Night of the Living Dead. But certainly there's no shortage of B-movie superstars who've sorta "understood the joke" and have embraced and utilized their cult status in fun ways. And Showgirls 2 is many things - chief amongst them is "fun."

So, for the millionth time, let's talk about "bad movies." I don't wanna get into my defensive mode again or reaffirm my exhaustive examination of the verbiage, but we're in that territory, so let's get dirty and come clean... Showgirls (1995) was universally panned and underperformed in theaters, but was a complete financial success on home video as audience's curiosity predictably generated a cult. And still, people watch it ironically, people watch it because they legitimately love it, people watch it for the nostalgia, people watch it for the nudity. It has its "following" or whatever, not solely because of its incompetence, but also its overpowering narcissism and general disregard for subtlety. In other words, it's loud and jiggly and dumb and tasteless (which was intentional) and funny (which, sadly, was mostly unintentional). Obviously there are plenty of people who didn't respond to any of this (neither ironically or seriously) and weren't able to get past the movie's shortcomings. Rena Riffel (like myself and so many others) is not one of those people. Sequelizing this pop culture phenomenon not only made her a clever opportunist, but an almost-brilliant satirist. 

Showgirls 2 does take place in the same universe as its predecessor, but it's a very different kinda Showgirls movie. The biggest and immediately-noticeable change of pace is that it's shot on video, which demands an entirely different approach than, say, a $40 million MGM picture. And while this format is typically exploited to convey "gritty realism," there's nothing too realistic going on here. The cheap aesthetic and clunky compositions and disorienting momentum add to the strength of its woozy charm -- but make no mistake: the truly, truly bad audio mix (dialogue and score) falls way out of the realm of any "so bad it's good"-type crap.

To describe the plot would not only cheapen whatever powers the movie has, but is also nearly impossible, because a.) there are too many abstractions to get a firm grip on a cohesive thread, b.) the rhythm of sequences and how they're cut are actually working against the odds of any traditional storytelling cognition, and c.) any spoken plot points are drowned out with overpowering ambient sound. Apart from the latter, she may've very well taken inspiration from Mulholland Drive - she does, after all, make a forthright visual reference to it early on in the movie. 

Here's the gist: Penny wants to be a famous dancer, happens upon a bag of cash (like the one that appears in most movies), and struggles to climb her way to the middle - navigating friends who become enemies and vice versa. The "stardom" subgenre has been around for some time - from A Star is Born to Boogie Nights (to Showgirls, to Mulholland Drive) - but this tale is built upon firsthand experience by someone who seems pleased with her place in the pantheon of pulp fiction, and the journey is so surreal that it's probably true. The movie is peppered with cast members from "Part 1" - possibly for continuity, but more likely a gimmick, as there are many references to the original Showgirls: some subtle, some honest, all mockery. 

Unlike the original, this movie is entirely self-aware (one doesn't accidentally make a movie called Showgirls 2), but ultimately, it's not a parody; it is its own thing. But, like the original, it's not quite as clever, fun, or sexy as it thinks it is. Its best moments are when it spirals into the truly bizarre, and that's when it most resembles the Trashploitation/Something Weird camp of the 1960s. It could've really worked under that label, and the major thing preventing it from simply being that is its 145 minute runtime. That's right: 2 hours and 25 minutes. I really have no problem with long films (obviously), but a movie of this scope severely suffers from this much space; the passion of this indie filmmaker and her love of each scene/shot/take is visceral, but its pointed humor starts to drown as sequences go on and on and on until we start laughing at it, not with it (like the first one). 

Yes, it's totally a Texas Chainsaw 2-type sequel; not in terms of budget or subject matter, but in style and attitude and tonal distance from the first one. It's an intentional "Midnite Movie," which is a dark path to follow because nothing's more obnoxious than a movie that thinks it's "hip." But, because of what it is and how it is (and especially who it is), it earned its self-appointed absurdity. 

- Paul