When “Showgirls” opened in the fall of 1995, it was mocked and damned with more derision than the usual movie debacle.
That’s because, according to the conventional view, it was not just a bad movie but an unspeakably vulgar bad movie.
Directed by the talented Euro sensationalist Paul Verhoeven, from a script by the top-dollar pasha of tabloid high concept Joe Eszterhas, it was “All About Eve” remade as a glitzy Vegas trash opera of live flesh, and it was perceived as having committed a kind of double sin.
Yes, it was tacky and pulpy, sleazy and over-the-top.
But part of what drove the collective nose-thumbing was a kind of lingering American puritanism that said: A movie that dives into a swamp this sordid, drinking in the voyeuristic shallowness of it all, has to be ridiculed.
“Showgirls” was its own category of disaster, a Hollywood bomb that exposed itself with full-frontal shamelessness.
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