DIRECTOR
Paul Verhoeven

SCREENWRITER
Joe Eszterhas

PRODUCERS
Charles Evans
Alan Marshall

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Jost Vacano

MUSIC
David A. Stewart

EDITORS
Mark Goldblatt
Mark Helfrich

CAST

Elizabeth Berkley (Nomi Malone)
Kyle MacLachlan (Zack Carey)
Gina Gershon (Cristal Connors)
Glenn Plummer (James Smith)
Robert Davi (Al Torres)
Alan Rachins (Tony Moss)
Gina Ravera (Molly Abrams)

MPAA rating: NC-17
Running time: 131m
U.S. release: September 22, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official website

Other Paul Verhoeven films
reviewed on this website:

- Hollow Man
- Starship Troopers

DIRECTOR
David Fincher

SCREENWRITER
Andrew Kevin Walker

PRODUCERS
Phyllis Carlyle
Arnold Kopelson

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Darius Khondji

MUSIC
Howard Shore

EDITOR
Richard Francis-Bruce

CAST

Morgan Freeman (Somerset)
Brad Pitt (Mills)
Gwyneth Paltrow (Tracy)
Reg E. Cathey (Coroner)
R. Lee Ermey (Police Captain)
Richard Roundtree (Talbot)
John C. McGinley (California)
Richard Portnow (Dr. Beardsley)
Mark Boone Junior (Stinky Man)
Leland Orser (Crazed Man)
Richmond Arquette (Delivery Man)
Charles Dutton (Cop)
Bob Mack (Gluttony)
Gene Borkan (Greed)
Michael Reid MacKay (Sloth)
Cat Mueller (Lust)
Heidi Schanz (Pride)
Kevin Spacey (John Doe)

MPAA rating: R
Running time: 123m
U.S. release: September 22, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official website

Other David Fincher films
reviewed on this website:

- Fight Club
- Panic Room

"You fuck them without fucking them," says a showgirl's friend about her relationship to her customers. That sums up Showgirls, a movie I expected to be sleazy, offensive, and bad, but not boring. That it's all four at once -- often in the same scene -- doesn't make it the year's worst film (Batman Forever still claims that title), but it does make it the year's biggest scam. I didn't go to Showgirls for the nudity, which God knows is available elsewhere, and I didn't go hoping for art or even a coherent story. What I wanted, I guess, was some justification for the hype, some electricity, some heat -- something resembling a movie. This is the first major-studio film to be classified NC-17 (No Children Under 17), but there's nothing in Showgirls that you haven't seen in a dozen unrated "erotic thrillers," or even in R-rated movies of a less repressive period, so the NC-17 rating is once again squandered. I'm in the odd position of hoping Showgirls makes money even though it sucks: If it flops, NC-17 -- the last best hope of American adult movies (as opposed to porn) that push past the R-rated envelope -- may go down with it.

Showgirls is all jiggle and no sizzle. That's especially surprising coming from director Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch bad boy whose last movie, Basic Instinct, both parodied and buried the erotic-thriller genre. Plunging into the cynical sex-slime of Joe Eszterhas' script, Verhoeven operated with such transgressive-aggressive glee that the film holds up today as a flustered film noir farce. Showgirls, also written by Eszterhas, isn't nearly as offensive or as guiltily pleasurable. Under the surface of writhing bodies and smutty talk lies ... a morality play circa 1935, in which our innocent heroine (or relatively innocent in Eszterhas' world -- she's an ex-hooker) learns that Las Vegas is full of bad men. The movie seems to say that life as a Vegas stripper would be fulfilling and prosperous if not for the crude sexists who run and patronize the clubs. You mean crude sexists like Verhoeven and Eszterhas?

Elizabeth Berkley, unknown to me (she was a regular on TV's Saved by the Bell), makes her screen debut as the heroine, Nomi Malone, a drifter who hitches to Vegas and sets herself up at a cheesy nightclub. Those unfamiliar with lap-dancing can learn something from the early scenes, in which Nomi rubs her naked, sweaty merchandise all over Kyle MacLachlan (playing the "entertainment manager" of a competing club, and occasionally showing his embarrassment in the role). MacLachlan, who pays Nomi the ultimate compliment (he creams his jeans), has come to Nomi's club with his superstar showgirl Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon). Cristal is one of those nasty, elite Eszterhas bisexual puppetmasters -- you meet one every day. She zeroes in on Nomi, pulls strings to get her hired at her fancier club (which is basically Nomi's club with slightly better decor), and has some sexual fixation on Nomi that I, for one, did not share.

A fascinating movie could be made about the inner workings of the unapologetically retro Vegas clubs and the women who work there -- how they interact with the clientele (who can't all be leering pigs, as they are in this movie), how they separate their highly sexualized jobs from their home lives. Showgirls isn't that movie. For one thing, Verhoeven doesn't have the performers. Berkley and Gershon look their parts, but Berkley comes off as an unappealing bimbo -- you look in her eyes and see Cheez Whiz -- and Gershon, though coldly amusing in the Sharon Stone manner, has nothing to do except repeat her three or four basic expressions. Gina Ravera, as Nomi's roomie Molly, suggests some warmth and depth, but Molly only exists as the movie's drab conscience, and she endures an ugly rape scene that has various subtexts but doesn't strike the emotional chord it should. Alan Rachins, such a great rat on L.A. Law all those years, is consistently funny as a hard-assed club owner, but his character is as poorly written as the rest.

And then there are the money scenes -- the elaborate production numbers with bare-assed showgirls parading around the stage as fireballs go up and pouting male dancers writhe around them. It's all very '80s, like the hideous "Satan's Alley" number at the end of Staying Alive; if this is what real nudie shows are like these days, I'd just as soon avoid Vegas. The dancing isn't erotic, it's aerobic. Honestly, I don't get it. And if the ridiculous, thrashing sex scene in MacLachlan's pool was supposed to get me hard, it left me as limp as the movie itself. Showgirls is the latest nasty-sex movie -- a conservative genre in disguise, creating a world in which sex boils down to the user and the used, all of whom are degraded and guilty. Even the grossest porn is more cheerfully sexual than this movie. It's a lap-dance, but it's not likely to make anyone come.

"I'm erect," says Rachins to Nomi, comparing his dick to her nipples. "Why aren't you?" If Verhoeven and Eszterhas (the Erectile Duo) asked me the same question, I'd show them two videos to shut them up: Don't Look Now, which contains the gentlest, most fumbling and naturalistic (and therefore hottest) lovemaking scene ever put on film, and any Astaire-Rogers musical, whose romantic dance numbers remain more erotically expressive than anything in Showgirls.

In an anonymous city as dark and wet as a puddle at midnight, a vicious, brilliant killer has been dispatching people based on which of the seven deadly sins they've committed. Seven, the creepy and shocking new thriller starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, stumbles into the occasional plot hole -- the premise is one of those neat, symmetrical conceits that invite lapses of logic -- but the director, David Fincher, does a bruising job of alchemy, turning a gimmicky cop thriller into a work of spiritual horror. Fincher's only previous film was the unjustly dismissed Alien 3, a humid and bitter mood piece that worked quite well as a coda to that anguished series. Fincher is a graduate of the MTV Film School, but unlike some of his up-from-rock-video contemporaries, he doesn't exalt the image at the expense of words or emotions. Seven has moments as chilling and forceful as anything in The Silence of the Lambs.

Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker does something brave: He comes up with heroic characters so clichéd they have whiskers, but he puts a spin on them by ... letting them talk. They reveal themselves not by the usual Screenwriting 101 quirks or habits (though there are some of those here too, unfortunately) but by their philosophy. Lieutenant William Somerset (Freeman), a veteran homicide cop, is about to retire after 34 years (3 + 4: one of the movie's sly "seven" references for the attentive) and has a weary, cynical view of the citizens he protects and captures; he wishes the world weren't a shithole of violence and evil, but it is, and he's long since given up on any hope of changing things. More optimistic is his new partner, Detective David Mills (Pitt), who's hot to close this weird deadly-sins case that's just opened up; a man of action, he talks too much and doesn't think enough. Walker and Fincher draw subtle parallels and differences between these men. Seven, it turns out, isn't so much about catching the killer as about how one cop's worldview is validated, to the despair of his partner.

Every director has a blind spot, and Fincher's, like so many MTV boys, is a lack of spatial clarity. We don't know where any of the settings are in relation to each other; each scene builds to a visual wallop (and also an emotional one, which is what sets Fincher apart) but never gives us our geographical bearings. That, however, may be part of Fincher's plan. Working with the outstanding cinematographer Darius Khondji, Fincher fills the wide screen with darkness; the actors' faces, barely illuminated, fade in from the void. The scenes of the detectives entering some pitch-black apartment and encountering the ugly leavings of madness have a suffocating, threatening mood of dread. Yet it's not the usual dread of such thrillers, which make you afraid that something will pop out at the heroes (nothing ever does, with one sensational exception); it's the dread associated with seeing lonely, obscure people who died in terrible pain and in terrible ways, just because a righteous madman singled them out for his wrath. The movie has some of the impact of the scene in Silence of the Lambs when the sad, heavy corpse was unveiled on the slab. It's the human body as a playpen for insanity.

Fincher uses his stars cleverly. Brad Pitt, who has always struck me as a callow marquee idol with a little charm on loan from Robert Redford, comes through with a witty portrait of a man with lots of heart and guts but not a lot of brain cells. He makes an itchy, impatient, funny hero, and the great Morgan Freeman is around to cool him down. Incapable of a less-than-stunning performance, Freeman is a generous team player, lifting his co-stars up to his level without breaking a sweat (Pitt has Freeman to thank for much of his fine work here). It's completely Freeman's show, but he doesn't carry it so much as embody its concerns. Pitt gets top billing, but we experience everything through Somerset's wise, sad eyes. Whenever the writer gives him a philosophical speech, Freeman brings it home without a scratch, lending the words gravity without pomposity. The pocket of warmth that develops between these men stands in stark contrast to the cold shadows that close in around them.

And what about the killer? The identity of the actor who plays him is supposed to be some big secret, but I don't see why; this isn't really that kind of movie (if we're ever meant to think that the killer could be Somerset or Mills, there are no red-herring hints to suggest that). And the actor isn't, say, Harrison Ford or Tom Hanks -- stars that we would be shocked to find playing twisted butchers. I will say that this is the second time this year that this actor (who looks and acts here like a demented Michael Stipe) has played a villain shrouded in mystery, and he plays him to eerie perfection. Near the end, the killer has a self-justifying speech that rivals Ben Kingsley's in Death and the Maiden for pure insane logic, and the actor sells it beautifully. The righteous Mills rejects the killer's rant as mania, but Somerset is too old inside to dismiss it out of hand: The world really is horrible, and innocence gets harder to find every day. What matters is how one responds and relates to life in spite of that. Seven will lure people on the strength of its sicko premise and baroque deaths (some of the clinical details will shock the unshockable), but it's as serious as they come, a moral vision of an amoral landscape. By the end, when the final blood is drawn on scorched, infertile soil -- a battlefield of mind and soul -- the portrait of desolation is complete. Seven is the most disquieting and powerful Hollywood thriller in years.