You don't go into a Shannon Whirry flick expecting "Citizen Kane", but seeing that this one has the pseudonym "Alan Smithee" attached really doesn't inspire confidence.
The movie's credit sequence is also discouraging: it goes on far too long, with an awful song and lame footage of beaches and oceans to boot.
We go to what looks like a resort on the water where Whirry is with a young man. He proposes to her and she apparently accepts.
Cue the movie's only sex scene, in which Shannon shows her breast and butt.
The hunky young man who proposed to her has a dad who warns him about marriage. He seems like a criminal, but is actually a policeman.
The action moves to a strip club, where a few women show their breasts. One, in particular, has breasts that are unbelievably fake looking, like they're made out of rubber and plastic, and could lift off like a fat suit.
I wonder if anyone was thrilled to see footage of strippers in movies, even in the mid-nineties.
There are too many characters introduced in these scenes, including an oily man with a David Beckham-like hairdo, another guy who looks like Dolph Lundgren with facial-acromegaly, and another oily guy. They have shotguns and are apparently planning a robbery.
Beckham-hair guy doesn't want to rob the strip joint now because his "girl is in there". Does he mean Shannon Whirry? He's not the one who proposed to her.
Apparently Shannon works at the strip joint? That's funny, because with her natural, babe next door looks (and natural breasts), she sure doesn't look like she belongs there.
At long last we get Shannon's stripper performance at a half-hour into the movie. It doesn't feel like much has really happened so far. For some reason, when she strips, the bar is practically empty. It looks like she's auditioning rather than performing for a crowd. The robber bozos finally burst in, right after Shannon bares her breasts.
The robbery ends in a death by gunshot that actually looks fairly realistic.
One of the robbers says "didn't want for this to happen, but it did", and leaves.
The idiots take a really long time to rob the strip club, and end up killing another guy. Then one guy pulls his mask off, and they aim guns at each other. This scene goes for so long that it completely loses any of the suspense it might have generated.
I got the impression - which turned out to be correct - that the majority of this movie is going to be spent on the robbery. What a waste of my time it's going to be, I thought, sitting through this drivel.
The action cuts to the coppers gathered outside the building, as they always do in movies where there are robbers inside. But this was the first one that made me think: Hey, guys - you're not doing anyone any good out there.
Whirry gets out at about the one-hour mark, but, you know what? We're still stuck in there with the idiots and their tedious hostage situation.
For some reason Whirry disguises herself as a member of SWAT and goes back into the strip club. Yeah, we know she can dance around on stage in a skimpy outfit, but letting her join SWAT with no training and no experience seems like a slightly foolhardy decision.
We obviously expect that Whirry will save the day - at least I assume that she is supposed to be the hero. She crawls through a vent in her SWAT uniform. But then she gets snatched by one of the good guys, who puts his hand over her mouth, apparently to stop her from getting noticed, and getting killed. Yeah, you were a great help, Shannon. They wasted that SWAT uniform when they gave it to you. Weird they just happened to have one kicking around, and in your size to boot.
I guess the guy who grabbed her is the real hero after all. He poses shirtless at the end, all smudged in soot, his boobs almost as big as Whirry's.
God, this movie taxed me. It is an exercise in pointlessness. In some reviews I am moved to write that I couldn't care about anything that happened on screen. In this one, I am not sure that anything really DOES happen on screen. Yeah, I got that some robbers held up a strip club and took people hostage and then some guy saved the day (Whirry didn't really do anything, but she gets top billing and is apparently the protagonist?) But in the rest of the movie, nothing happens. Nothing. It is so empty. Thank god it's over.
