Showgirls [DVD] [1996]

Product Details

• Actors: Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi
• Directors: Paul Verhoeven
• Writers: Joe Eszterhas
• Producers: Alan Marshall, Ben Myron, Charles Evans, Lynn Ehrensperger, Mario Kassar
• Format: PAL
• Language English
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
• Number of discs: 1
• Classification: 18
• Studio: Twentieth Century Fox
• DVD Release Date: 30 Jun 2003
• Run Time: 128 minutes
  

By : Elizabeth Berkley (Actor), Kyle MacLachlan (Actor), Paul Verhoeven (Director)|Rated:Suitable for 18 years and over|Format: DVD
Price : £2.00

Customer Reviews

I got hold of the Dutch Uncut Blu Ray, what can I say? It's my favourite trashy movie in glorious HD.
The picture and sound are great, and the movie is just as entertaining as ever.
Not sure what makes it uncut, but it has plenty of overly gratuitous nudity, and the funniest sex scene in movie history.
There are no extras at all on the disc, but you do get to enjoy one of the worst acting performances in cinematic history, pure gold!

I should start with a caveat - I am a huge Verhoeven fan. His Hollywood films are some of my favourite film treats, and I have probably watched them more times than is healthy.
What intrigues me about Showgirls is that it follows a familiar pattern within Verhoeven's work, but one which seems to have passed most viewers by. Robocop was a masterful pastiche of policier dramas, ultraviolent underground movies, and tongue-in-cheek social commentary. Basic Instinct was a wonderful parody of Hitchcockian suspense drama mixed with steamy erotic thriller overtones. Total Recall is a sci-fi story about a man experiencing a traditional sci-fi story, with all the genre's cliches and tropes writ large. Where these multi-layered works are generally acknowleged as such, Showgirls seems to have been dismissed as trash.
Of all of Verhoeven's films, this one perfects the blending of parody with paradigm. Taking the story of the "country girl in big city loses her way" to its extreme, his ingenue star pouts and glides her way through the most outrageously camp and over-the-top story I've seen in a long time. The dance set-pieces are gloriously showy, the sex scenes ridiculously overblown, the performances hammed up to the max. Verhoeven revels in the smut and the glamour, and attempts to make the ultimate soft-porn extravaganza.
Like all of Verhoeven's movies, the surface story and glossy production covers a great love and understanding of the genre in which he is working, and invests this rag-to-riches tale with a huge sense of fun, and class. I particularly like the ending, as she leaves Las Vegas with nothing, just as she began, even down to the driver and car. It gives a sense that this story has happened a thousand times, to a thousand poor girls, in the original "sin city".

 

Showgirls [DVD] [1996]