Showgirls 2: Penny's from Heaven

Although only experiencing 3 minutes of this film because my husband had to show me what he considered the worst film he ever saw (and he gave up after 15 minutes), I could not wait to jump on IMDb to learn a little more about how this catastrophie occurred and who was responsible.

These are THE BEST user reviews I have ever read! I spent more time reading the reviews then watching the movie! They are hilarious! My favorite is the one where the reviewer stated that it made one wish they were blind and deaf!

There was one review that simply seemed mean spirited towards the leading actress and I don't think was necessary, the rest were so good at saying how bad it was it made me consider turning it back on ... and then come to my senses and not.

Showgirls 2: Penny's from Heaven: 1 out of 10: Rena Riffel one of the actresses from Showgirls cobbled together an unofficial sequel/remake fan film with some of the original cast. It is technically a film.

The Good: Under the right circumstances (I am thinking psilocybin mushrooms.) this movie can be entertaining. It starts off on the right foot and seems to be almost entertaining with interesting cameos and a Daliesque surreal touch but one quickly realizes it is just meandering from one setpiece to the other with no real rhyme or reason.

To her credit, Rena Riffel is in surprisingly good shape and does her best to work with her um assets. I would actually hold her blameless based on her performance was she not also the writer and director of the film.

The Bad: Amazon currently has a version of this film streaming called Showgirls 2: The Cut which is the original film cut down to 100 minutes from the original 145 minutes. Well, it is a start. The problem is not just length (though that certainly does not help matters) it is that the scenes simply never go anywhere in ways that defy description.

I almost think Showgirls 2 should be shown in Film School as a lesson of how not to shoot a scene, frame a shot, or transition from one scene to another. The entire film is like the first seven minutes of Manos the Hands of Fate with occasional middle-aged topless nudity. The level of filmmaking and storytelling incompetence is simply of the charts.

The Ugly: Rena Riffel is from the Cheri Caffaro school of filmmaking. No matter how old I get nothing more nubile is allowed to appear in the scene. So we have the primary rival/love interest Shelley Michelle playing the Gina Gershon role but looking like Rue Mccallahan in a Golden Girls rerun. People complained that Showgirls 2 was like watching a porn film with all the sex scenes taken out but in all honesty would it have been better if they were left in?

In Conclusion: You can do this kind of movie correctly. Misty Mundae and Seduction Cinema put together a string of these in the early aughts. (The Lord of the G-Strings: The Femaleship of the String, Spiderbabe etc). Rena Riffel does have a surrealistic touch to her story but she simply should not be allowed to edit or direct film and she needs a strong co-writer to focus her craft. She clearly has talent. Unfortunately, her surreal trip was lost in a deluge of craft errors and poor follow through.

First off, while I didn't think the first film was great by any standards, it served up as a half decent b movie. The kind of movie you can watch if you want to make fun of and yet still have a semi decent viewing experience.

Showgirls 2 on the other hand makes a C movie (severely low budget amateur movies) look like Hollywood A films. The acting, camera work, sets, script...I'm not an accountant but even I want to do some forensic accounting to figure out where all the budget for this film went. i've seen better camera work by highschool students, and even better acting and scripts from low budget porn movies.

I was halfway through before I pulled the plug on it. do yourself a favour, watching anything more than the trailer is a waste of time.

Compared to this, Showgirls is a Oscar winning masterpiece. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in this movie is even decent. The plot, the acting, the camera work is all horribly wrong. The only reason to watch this is you want to take tips of how not to make a bad movie.

If there ever was a movie that should have never been thought of, written, shared, cast, rehearsed, shot, edited nor released, this is it.