Monday, June 8, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema - Downtown, Los Angeles
One of the most derided movies of the 20th century is also one of its most spectacularly misunderstood. The odd-couple tag team of Dutch provocateur director Paul Verhoeven (ROBOCOP, ELLE) and Sleazoid-Hungarian-American writer Joe Eszterhas (FLASHDANCE, SLIVER) first came together with 1992's BASIC INSTINCT, and everyone, including the financial backers and the producer/distributors of this movie, assumed lightning would strike twice for the duo with 1995's SHOWGIRLS. Universally panned by critics upon its initial release, people found the multi-tap combo of inane dialogue, wild over-acting, and extreme obscenity and grotesquerie to be just too much. Then the "so-bad-it's-good" crowd sunk their hollow claws into the movie, claiming it as one of the "best worst" movies of all time. To be sure, yes, this is a movie in which *Saved By the Bell*'s Elizabeth Berkley sets fire to her TV-star image by grinding her pelvis on Kyle MacLachlan's lap until he simulates sexual climax while Gina Gershon watches. She shoves chips into her mouth and reminisces about her days of eating and enjoying "puppy chow," between bouts of trying to make it as a Las Vegas showgirl "goddess." The assumption that critics and chuckleheads alike have made are that a) Verhoeven and Eszterhas weren't trying to make something with humor (they were), and b) that the surface story is meant to be taken at face value (it's not). Verhoemie don't play that. SHOWGIRLS is a complicated, satirical masterpiece that tests the audience's limits of empathy and challenges some basic assumptions about American dreams of celebrity, pokes at the artificiality of Hollywood glitz and glamour, and shines a light on the misogyny and dehumanization inherent in the entertainment industry, all while keeping the audiences on their toes as they try to know whether they should laugh, cry, or scratch their heads because there are random interruptions by chimpanzees and the fiercest dancing ever committed to celluloid. (Laird Jimenez)