REWATCH: Showgirls [1995]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Because Keith couldn't come to movie night, we decided to do a rewatch of one of our earlier and more famous films: "Showgirls" particularly since it is in the news right now as Elizabeth Brinkley, the lead actress, has publicly stopped ignoring the fact that she was in this bomb of a movie and decided to embrace its bad movie cult following.

The plot follows Nomi Malone, a hitchhiker who wants to go to Las Vegas to dance, and in spite of being an unrepentant jerk to everyone she meets she finds a roommate within hours after beating on her car and being really rude. Nomi reacts to everything with shouting and often violent responses and she's rarely nice to people she meets, yet somehow she manages to charm her way to the top. She starts off as a stripper but manages to get an audition for a topless show after meeting the star of the show, Cristal Connors, through her roommate and dry humping the entertainment director (played by Kyle MacLachlan) for Connors' amusement. I'm assuming this is how Vegas works. She ends up in the show and learns all the terrible things that come with showgirl fame like other rude girls, expectations to bone Japanese business men, injuring other people to get ahead, cocaine, and boning Kyle MacLachlan like a beached fish struggling for life. She learns nothing initially and pushes Cristal Connors down the stairs to become the star but when her roommate gets gang raped, she gets revenge and then, with her past as a prostitute revealed, she leaves Vegas with the sign at the end of the movie possibly implying that she's off to try her luck in Los Angeles instead. 

This movie is bananas. It's over two hours long and I think someone is topless 80% of the time. There are a million what-the-hell lines, melodramatic scenes, trashy outfits, sex scenes that make you never want to have sex again, and not a character to be found among this insane cast of caricatures. There is definitely an intended theme here about the high price of fame but everything about this movie feels so fake that there's no way to draw anything useful from it. There are also some smaller and less explored themes around the honesty of sex work (an aspiring choreographer tells Nomi that stripping is honest and the topless show is not because it is designed for people to pretend they aren't seeing the show for boobs) and a really strong Sapphic theme, the intention of which is unclear. The director, Paul Verhoevan, is too good for this movie.

Quotes:

(There are way, way too many to list so I will just write the first few that I know by heart.)

"Man, everybody got AIDS and shit!"

"It must be weird not having anybody cum on you."

"You like nice tits?"

"I like having nice tits."

"How do you like having them?"

"First you get used to the money; then you swallow."

"Where are you from?"

"Back east."

"Where back east?"

"DIFFERENT PLACES!"

"I'm erect. Why aren't you erect?"

"Let's not jump to conclusions."

"If this happens again, you're going to jump to your conclusion!"

Some GIFs to give you an idea of what you will get into if you watch this:

And some pictures we took.

Adam has the box set. It comes with "fun" party games like pin the pasties on the stripper. He also wants to remind you that he watched this movie with his grandmother.

"Showgirls" shot glasses to drink yourself into oblivion with.

 Sarah shows off cards with the games on them.

And Kay shows the right way to watch "Showgirls".

Shark Night [2011]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

From the director who brought you the second and fourth "Final Destination" movies and "Snakes On A Plane" comes one of the most startlingly uncreative films ever made: "Shark Night." The plot was ripped right out of the dead college student horror movie guidebook. Instead of watching this, you should probably just watch "Cabin In The Woods" and not destroy your evening. 

Seven Tulane University students and their dog set out to one of their summer houses for a few nights of fun. As we have come to understand it they are The Scholar (who is an explicitly stated virgin), The Athlete, The Fool, The Other Fool (we named him Buttflex after his nude intro), The Slut, The Virgin, and The Girl Who Dies Too Soon To Get A Personality But Is Dating The Athlete. First the Athlete gets his arm bitten off off-screen shortly followed by his girlfriend getting devoured by a shark off-screen. It should be noted that the Athlete is black and his girlfriend is Latina. Yes. They went there. The Scholar tries his best to help his unarmed friend to little avail but all seems to be saved when those two rednecks they met at the rest stop show up and offer to help. Instead of calling for help they take the Fool and the Slut out into the water and feed them to the sharks who they apparently control and have rigged up with cameras. Buttflex tries to take the Athlete to help on his own but Athlete commits suicide on the way and Buttflex is eaten by a giant shark head on. This leaves just the Scholar and the Virgin who are separately kidnapped by the rednecks and told of their evil plan: to make shark snuff films for consumers for whom "Shark Week" is too tame. Sharks After Dark, if you will. They are saved by their virgin powers. The dog is also fine.

This movie is so lazy that within just a few minutes we were predicting accurately who would die when and what would happen.The phrase "I hate this" was muttered by everyone in attendance at different points in time. But to say something nice about the movie: it is hilariously meta. The whole scheme of the bad guys is to profit off people's voyeuristic enjoyment of watching people get attacked by sharks . . . which is the exact reason anyone would watch a shark attack movie like this one in the first place. It's like the creators are saying, "We see you, audience, and we're judging you." Well, I'm judging you right back. No amount of meta commentary on human nature could make this movie not the embodiment of boring and conventional mediocrity. 

Bloodrayne [2005]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Sometimes before we watch a movie we do a little pre-show. It could be anything really but is often a funny YouTube video someone found recently or a bad music video. This time we watched two videos of the director of this movie, Uwe Boll, shouting about stuff. In the first he ranted about Hollywood, calling out specific actors and films and using a lot of offensive language including racist comments and "retard". In the second he tells his fans (all three of them?) to go to hell for not donating enough money to his Kickstarter to make "Rampage 3". This winner of a human made this film.

To get personal for a moment, as someone who knows a fair amount about the history of fashion, if a movie doesn't tell me when it takes place, I can usually figure it out within a decade what time period it is by the clothes they are wearing. I can sometimes even figure out the place by the clothes and architecture. That being said, according to IMDb this movie takes place in 1700s Romania and I call shenanigans. Throughout the whole movie Adam and I were completely distracted by the fact that the men were either wearing the 1700s as interpreted by a costume supply store or vaguely Medieval LARPing attire. This is vastly superior to the women who were either wearing late Victorian era dresses or rave attire purchased from Hot Topic or Forever 21 in 2005 (Adam renamed the movie "Bloodrave"). On top of that, half the characters had terrible wigs and the anachronisms didn't end there. This verse also contains modern pianos and covered wagons that make you want to travel the Oregon trail that are many decades out of time. Also, unrelated, but the vampire faces are totally ripped off from "Buffy."

I guess I should talk about the plot but it's really not even worth it. Rayne is a dhampir, half vampire and half human, and she escapes from a carnival where she is a freak on display to go hunt vampires since Big Bad vampire father (played by a Ben Kingsley puppet since it was cheaper to make a puppet of him than to pay him to show up) raped and killed her mother. She has many video game-esque adventures including having to go through secret rooms in a monastery to get special vampire eyes (the head monk is played by Udo Kier making this our second Udo Kier vampire movie in a row) and getting kidnapped and offered to vamp!Meat Loaf for his harem. After much fighting with really blunt swords, she ends up with a gang of vampire hunters and really randomly bangs one of the guys in the group so there can be a sequel baby. She finds a special vampire heart, Michelle Rodriguez betrays them or something, the Big Bad is defeated, and Rayne takes the throne of Super Vamp.

The weirdest part about this movie though, aside from the fact that so much money was spent on it, so many people agreed to be in it, and everything mentioned in the second paragraph, is the way it ended. After Rayne takes the throne you think the film is going to just end but instead there are a ton of flashbacks of random slow-motion scenes of violence through out the film. No reason; just all the bloodiest and goriest scenes played again in slow motion so you can see how very fake they look. My suggestion that this was some Brechtian "alienating the audience so they reflect more on the themes than the fantasy" move was not well received. A secret genius, Boll is not. A talentless hack, Boll is indeed.

Have some Loaf:

Dracula 3000 [2004]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Have you ever watched "Alien" and thought, "Well, this is good and all but I would much rather watch vampires than aliens and with less skilled execution?" All your dreams are about to come true now. Thankfully, we were prepared for our movie experience by eating garlic bread with dinner.

In a voiceover narration with character files reminiscent of a video game the main character Van Helsing, played by the blandly good-looking Casper Van Dien who was only ever in two decent movies, tells you who his crew is so as not to burden you with character development. There's the unfriendly blonde girl who is totally not an android, the large black guy who sexually harasses the female crew, the smart British guy in a wheelchair, the Russian girl who is still in space school, and Coolio, who is mostly just high all the time. They go in to explore an abandoned ship and the ship they arrived in drove away, as ships are apparently wont to do, leaving them stuck on this mysterious vessel. In between "action" the movie shows Skyped in scenes of Udo Kier talking about disasters on a ship so he can get a paycheck without having to put on pants. Finally the crew discovers a room of coffins full of sand, Coolio bleeds into one of them, and gets bitten by a vampire in a comically high-collared cape named Orlock. Then the movie mostly turns into a game of "Who has been bitten?" and "How do we kill these things?" Van Helsing, Coolio, British guy, and Russian girl all get changed by the Count in the dumb cape and killed by their crew once they figure out how to do it. Then all that remains are the Blonde android and the Big guy, a ship they can't pilot, and a bunch of vampires. The Blonde reveals that she is a pleasure bot and they go off to boink while the ship blows up, killing everything. Happy ending!

Considering "Holy Terror" and "Mutant Chronicles", this was easily one of the best Book Barn finds we've had in a while. The audio didn't match up for a large portion of the movie, all the vampires made silly faces, the plot was a blatant rip off, and the ending was bonkers. Pass me some more garlic bread.

Quotes:

"Sweet Jesus" [camera pans out to show a room of crosses]

"What's a vampire?"

"It's sort of like a man but far more evil if you can imagine that."

Also, imagine what "titty fuck" sounds like with a posh British accent.

Double Impact [1991]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

The more Van Dammes the better! While the last time we saw two Van Dammes it was the result of cloning, here we have two Van Dammes who are twins separated at birth! Maybe we'll one day see all the double Van Damme films and learn all the different cheap excuses for having an actor play a duel role.

After a Hong Kong business deal gone wrong, the Van Damme twins' parents get murdered. One of the twins, Chad, gets raised by the family bodyguard, Uncle Frankie, in France (to explain the accent) and becomes a karate expert and instructor who wears a lot of pastels. The other one, Alex, gets dumped at a Hong Kong orphanage and becomes a gangster. Many years later, Uncle Frankie decides to give up his respectable business to unite the two brothers and go after the gangsters and evil British dude who killed their parents. The gangster team consists of a leader who always wears a light-colored suit, Bolo Yeung, and the red-headed black-clad evil 90s action girl who can break your head with her thighs. A lot of fighting results from numerous "comedic" situations that occur when people mix up the brothers (this action was sometimes set in the subtly named Climax Club). At one point, Chad saves Alex's girlfriend and Alex responds by drinking and imagining them boinking which leads to a Van Damme on Van Damme fistfight that I guess the audience was waiting for. Our particular audience was waiting for Van Damme and Yeung to get unnecessarily shirtless which does happen during their final stand-off (I think it was Chad!Van Damme who also killed the British guy; Alex!Van Damme was busy killing muscular thigh girl and the suited leader). The Van Dammes save Uncle Frankie and Alex's girlfriend and in the end, they decide to embrace their fraternity and the film ends on a freeze frame:

They probably go on to form their own gang with Uncle Frankie and the girlfriend.

This movie is all the usual cheese we have come to expect from any given Van Damme movie. Now you also get hilariously bad special effects to have both Van Dammes in the scene at once:

So realistic!

Van Damme only did one split in this movie, very rare for him, and didn't show his butt, also rare. We did however get our one split in the form of this awkwardness:

Summarizing Line: "I think we were wasting our time here."

Quote: "You don't know what side your bread is buttered on, you silly git."

BMN Quote:

Adam: A VanDammewich.

Keith: Delicious but not too tough.