Lap Dance

Married couple goes to great lengths to amass quick money to pay their bills & live their dreams...but their new lifestyle slowly spins out of control to become a nightmare! Reminds me of a movie I would've picked up on a Tuesday night from a Blockbuster in the early 90s but Carmen Electra looked way younger and the plot was a little more fresh. Lap dances typically tend to be over rated but four stars seems appropriate for this...

This film tells the story of a young woman who enters the world of exotic dancing in order to pay for her father's mounting medical bills. Despite initial agreements with her fiancé, her relationship with her fiancé is severely compromised.

"Lap Dance" is a story of Monica's struggle to make money, but she still gets sucked into the glittery world of hedonism. I find it really strange that the fiancé actually stays in the club often. Isn't it so weird to watch your fiancée strutt it off in a club? Anyway, a lot of thing happen in the story, including fights with other women, jealousy, poor health and relationship problems. It is quite a struggle to keep herself at a distance from the money and attention, and this struggle is portrayed wel. It is interesting film to watch.

First of all, why the heck is IMDb giving Briana Evigan, Carmen Electra and Stacey Dash billing over Ali Cobrin? Ali is the star of this movie, followed by Robert Hoffman. Dash is virtually not in it. Maybe she appeared in such a tiny role as a favor to a friend. Evigan and Electra are in it a tad bit more, but not a whole lot.

Anyway, after getting the billing problem out of the way, I'd have to say many parts of this movie are very realistic, such as why Monica decides to take up dancing. I've talked to quite a few dancers some years ago when I was writing a book, and one of my characters was sort of like them. The girls I talked to told me how they started dancing for the most noble of reasons; helping family members with hospital bills, keeping their kids fed and off the streets, etc. "I'll dance for a month until the bills are paid." That month tends to become two and then a year. Many of those girls finally decide to start "tricking" and they get into drugs, and their lives spiral out of control. The movie was also realistic about the deep pitfalls many of those girls go through in their relationships with husbands/boyfriends as their insistence on making more and more money becomes the main priority for them. Without giving away spoilers, I'll say that the ending was not as realistic as the rest of the movie.

The acting was good. Ali Cobrin did a great job in her role. Robert Hoffman was good as her husband, as were the supporting players. The storyline - except for the ending - was believable. I began watching this movie expecting to hate it. I thought it was going to basically be a skin flick with no story. It wasn't, not at all. There is some nudity in it, but not much. Ali Cobrin is completely naked on the bed with a guy, but they go to great lengths not to show anything besides her naked profile and back (no butt in that scene). In another scene, she gets out of bed and walks to the bathroom completely naked showing her butt. In the strip club, some other girls show their breasts. If you're looking for nudity like in Showgirls, forget it.

I gave this a 7-star rating, because - as I said earlier - it's a mostly realistic take on strippers and the pitfalls of that profession. I thought they should have put a bit more grittiness into the film, and the ending could've been done better, but no film's perfect. This was not a film I wanted to see, but it surprised me.

This film is supposedly based on the true story of screenwriter/director Greg Carter and his girlfriend Junie Hoang as they struggled to earn money while trying to make their way to California to further their careers. Carter is Black and Hoang is Asian, yet Carter chose two Caucasian actors for the leads. Why? Did he think it would make the film more marketable? More palatable to White audiences? If so, he greatly miscalculated because the film tanked at the box office.

If Carter incorrectly portrays something as basic as the ethnicities of the protagonists, then the other events in this movie are probably fabricated as well. For example, he expects us to believe that his girlfriend worked as a stripper, hung out with rappers and drug dealers, was paid thousands of dollars for "companionship," yet remained completely faithful to him throughout most of her ordeal. I don't buy it.

There are several respectable actors in the movie, but they are all past their prime, and Carter doesn't use them to full advantage. Stacey Dash is only on screen for about 45 seconds, just a cameo role. Emmy Award-winning actress Lynn Whitfield appears sporadically, as does Academy Award nominee Mariel Hemingway. Blink and you'll miss porn star Ron Jeremy. Veteran character actor James Remar pretty much just lies in bed moaning and coughing.

Carmen Electra is 17 years older than the main character, too old to be cast as her rival and contemporary. Electra is also featured on the movie poster for this film, even though her role is a relatively minor one. Perhaps Carter thought that putting her on the poster instead of the unknown Ali Cobrin would make the film a bigger box office draw. Didn't work, and it's dishonest advertising.

Overall, this is a disappointing, lame, tepid movie. I suggest you skip it.

OK, it wasn't that bad - I did feel some level of caring for the characters, especially the main two. From what I know of strip clubs and the girls who work in them, the potential "pitfalls" as presented in this film are but a tiny sugar coated fraction of the real perils, which another reviewer here tells accurately. Anyway, maybe keeping it light is a refreshing change, so much in the real world is so dark anyway. I give it a 5.