Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Now, to be clear from the outset, I wasn’t expecting Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven to be good, but I just had to find out if it was somehow worse than the Verhoeven/Eszterhas perpetrated dumpster fire. It is. Very much so. So, curiosity satisfied, I suppose, but that’s the only satisfaction to be had here.
Do you remember Penny from Showgirls? Of course you don’t. But she was there, played by Rena Riffel, languishing somewhere towards the end of the credit roll, and here some sixteen years later she exhumes that character to tell her story, also directing, producing, writing and editing that story. So it has all the ingredients of a Best of the Worst contender, apart from any entertainment value.
Now, there’s a plot in here somewhere, meandering around the two and a half hours – two and a half hours! – that this stretches on for, but giving you any details will just make it sound like I’ve been gargling LSD, so on a high level it’s about Penny giving up her life as a stripper in the hope of rekindling her dance career, heading off to Vegas to do so.
On a broad level, she’s trying to get into the cast of a popular dance TV show, with very similar plot beats to the first film, which is a pretty questionable decision in and of itself, dancers betraying each other to get ahead, and being sucked into a world of vice, except this also heads off on weird tangents, like the nightclub hosted by a dude dolled up like the devil, the pointless visits to the pawn shop, the frequent application of Vaseline to teeth, or Penny’s maid who cleans in a soft porn outfit, or the attempt at erotic hot dog eating, or when the murder case Penny’s arrested for is solved by the soft porn maid who’s also a criminologist. It might be possible to make sense of this, but I don’t care to.
Rena Riffel claimed her Kickstarter trailer was shot on 35mm film with an Arriflex camera, and planned to do the rest of the film that way. However, $5,108 don’t buy a lot of film, and while I wasn’t on set, so can’t confirm one way or the other, I’m fairly sure this was filmed on a potato, with the audio captured by a slightly less capable potato, which rather hinders any attempt at comprehending this film. It’s just as amateurly edited and shot, and also manages the remarkable feat of having less competent and less erotic dance numbers than the first film. The script is a mess, and the dialogue is awful. Sure, it’s supposed to be awful, but this overachieves on the awfulness to the point where there’s no joy to be extracted from it, just embarrassment.
Look, in a way I don’t begrudge this film’s existence. Riffel clearly saw the “so bad it’s good” revival of the first film and saw a vector to grab some of that sweet ironic hatewatch dollar, and perhaps with a bit of restraint, and ideally, an actual microphone or two, some of the least awful ideas and lines could have made for an eighty minute novelty that would satisfy those poor misguided appreciators of Showgirls.
However, the end result here is that most unloved of creations, an intentionally “bad” film that’s going for the irony, but is also so badly made that it is just a miserable watch for all concerned. We watched it so you don’t have to. So, really, don’t.