Director: Rena Riffel
Screenplay: Rena Riffel
Cast: Rena Riffel as Penny Slot; ; Glenn Plummer as James 'Jimmy' Smith; Greg Travis as Phil; Dewey Weber as Jeffrey; Peter Stickles as Godhardt Brandt; Shelley Michelle as Katya Vardiova; Ford Austin as Mr. Von Brausen; Paula Labaredas as Maria Strauss; Hoyt Richards as Det. John Clayburn; Blanca Blanco as Mrs. Von Brausen
...instead I've been slumming around a dirty pole all the strippers like to lick for some reason.
Contextually it is fascinating in how Showgirls 2: Penny's from Heaven ever came to be. Let a film license lie long enough, even if it is famous or infamous, and you can buy the rights and make a sequel as has happened here. This is not the final case either, as Easy Rider (1969) of all things, despite being a film which helped kicked the door in for a new radical Hollywood into the seventies, had the rights to a sequel bought by filmmaker Dustin Rikert, who proceeded to make a 2012 low budget prequel which politically was a total paradox to the original. Showgirls 2 is interesting in that it is one of the cast of the original film who has created this film, Rena Riffel, which makes more sense. She returns to the character she played as years later, even bringing back actors from the original like Glenn Plummer in cameo roles, Plummer for example now trying to sells his "Life Sucks" t-shirts and occasionally appearing in this story once in a while. Also, this is a sequel to Showgirls (1995), the notorious Paul Verhoeven production that is one of the most divisive and polarising in his career, a personification of camp, so this film's existence is influenced by the shadow of the original film's reputation.
This however raises the immediate issue, in which the question of why I have ambivalent feelings to this sequel has to be considered, as this is a sequel trying to follow from Showgirls, the infamous NC-17 rated box office bomb which turned into a cult film. Showgirls is notorious yet, from the day French filmmaker Jacques Rivette proclaimed his love for the film1, the number of defenders have grown over the years. It is also a curious creation - to consider a film this sexually explicit or adult was once viewed as a potential box office hit is alien after two decades, but that it is also a very high budget film with production vague (even with Prince on the soundtrack) is another layer of its uniqueness in cinema too. Its existence, and how much changed in Hollywood in terms of a target audience, can be surmised in how its screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was once a huge figure who could earn huge sums of money just from premises, not even full scripts, such as $1.5 million for a two-page outline (among other aspects of the deal) for Jade (1995). Eszterhas is a huge factor to consider for Showgirls and how it turned out, among many, for his lurid potboilers with idiosyncratic dialogue and significantly having enough influence at one point he could demand his work be un-tampered with, or at least have his stamp over the material if it was not rewritten.
But let us not dismiss Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, who at one point managed to have box office clout for very adult films at this period, also of this time alien to ours now, a director I hold as an incredible filmmaker but also one who has flown too close to the sun at times for his uncomfortable depictions of sex and violence. If a later film like Elle (2016) however attests to something, it proved that he was always the subversive who could find inspired directions with the materials, that for every time he stepped to close to his detractors' views on him (Hollow Man (2000), although that is worth a re-evaluation), he at his best is complex. Trying to work with the script for Showgirls, after the success of their collaboration Basic Instinct (1992), it is clear he had to wrangle around Eszterhas' voice, the final film having a split personality knowing the director was working the material in a subversive way, but that it was also utterly tawdry and ridiculous.
That is a l-o-n-g prologue before we get to Rena Riffel's sequel, but in contrast, Penny's from Heaven feels improvised and with trying to follow the cult aura the prequel had, specifically that it developed a camp fan base. Ultra low budget cinema is, to be frank, erratic in its qualities and is an acquired taste but even for a connoisseur like myself, there is a knife point between engaging as accidental surrealism, or admiring the hard work trying to put it together, and something which is a nightmare to sit through. Feeling its two and a half hour length, longer than the original, that running time proves probably one of the film's biggest if not most vulnerable Achilles' heels. Maybe if it had been ridiculous, say four hours, the result might have been compelling as a strange chimera, but the film only gets a semblance of focus halfway through when Penny (the director-writer herself) eventually goes on her journey to join a TV dancing variety show called Stardancer, an obsession as much as wanting to become a ballet dancer despite that being something you usually start as a child.
The film finally reaches a plot, after a prologue including a female serial killer dressed as Marilyn Monroe and a trip to Mulholland Dr, when Penny meets Godhardt Brandt (Peter Stickles) and Katya Vardiova (Shelley Michelle) twenty minutes into the film. Shelley Michelle is fascinating in the sense, in a career where she has played the body double for actresses like Kim Basinger and Julia Roberts, her work outside of this film could have played to a fascinatingly weird twist on a Vertigo-story for the micro budget. Peter Stickles was a complete surprise, as I immediately recognised him from James Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006), a drama where the cast had real sex (explicitly shown) on camera, but was not an adult porn film that prioritised the sex, instead a great film which focused on the drama as an ensemble story, but did not pretend to depict the sex by faking it.
He is, by far, the best performance in the cast, though even he has to work around like comparing Penny in sex service as fast-food. The dialogue, and the film in general, is off in its own little world of its own. It also has pretensions, which is also a huge issue, as at times it feels like the film wants to be deliberately silly, and then suddenly Rena Riffel wants to deal with the Madonna/Whore complex, without subtlety having Katya calls herself the Madonna and Penny the whore. I have been apprehensive about the review as, having defending films in this category in the past, there is a greater guilt as this is a rare example directed and created by a woman, which sucks in terms of dismissing it when most (Things (1989), After Last Season (2009)) have I have admired for their "peculiarities" are usually made by men. There is however two arguments to make. One is that I have covered films by female filmmakers in this area - a film like Love on a Leash (2011) that, for all its egregious content, unexpectedly became sincere and truly weird or that I have to just think of the Doris Wishman films I have seen over the years. The other is that I feel, unfortunately, Rena Riffel thought this film would be more profound than it turned out, whilst also having her cake and eating it with the camp edge, particularly as, in its one great virtues, a lot of side characters being gay men or transgender people evoke a more diverse world of catty one-liners I wish had been leaned into.
I sincerely think Riffel wanted to also make this a film indebted to David Lynch, which is not a surprise as the other prominent film she was in is Mulholland Dr. (2001), explicitly evoking the beginning where, instead of a disorientated Laura Harring entering the titular street, it is Penny in a blood stained white dress. Scenes start to make sense when I realise she is trying to riff off his - Shelley Michelle smearing white face cream in madness is clearly based on Diane Ladd with the red lipstick in Wild at Heart (1990), as is the abrupt godlike appearance of a man with dwarfism who offers advice to Penny to talk to the Black Madonna, and is never mentioned again.
The entire esoteric subplot is also abrupt. This Showgirls sequel has Godhardt being part of a Freemasons group, influenced by the teachings of real Russian occultist Madame Blavatsky, entering their lodge which, alongside having a window mural of The Wizard of Oz with added Nazi swastikas, leads to the strangest moment of the whole film. Where a man dressed like Satan, including red facial prosthetics, sings accompanied by a guitarist with a special chicken mask that covers their whole head, an egg dangling off and an exposed brain. If Penny's From Heaven had gone this direction, with the direction of Showgirls if it had become occult, I would have been onboard as this is certainly a bizarre and memorable sequel.
This is not the direction the film goes. Most of the films I have talked of have been under ninety minutes or less. Showgirls 2: Pennies from Heaven enters this ballpark of bizarre outsider cinema, and could have used the weight of its length to its advantage even by accident. The kind of weird where, no matter how cheap and ridiculous it would be, it transcends into something truly bizarre and compellingly so. Not for everyone, but the fan base or the morbidly curious will become obsessed with over time. Cinematography wise, it is jarring, from the huge production value of the original film, to see the film having to signpost the initial Las Vegas setting with a photograph or seeing a strip club depicted with an outdoor bar. On the other hand, the ordinary and tacky Americana on display would have been perfect as a contrast, from the plastic marlin fish on a wall to a plastic indoor wishing well. It annoying never gets to this.
Notable as well, in contrast to most micro budget films not being able to hire cast who may be comfortable doing nude scenes, Penny's from Heaven is very explicit even if Showgirls was far more lurid, mostly because Rena Riffel herself is willing to do the scenes herself alongside other members of the female cast. She even replicates the infamous sequence where lead Elizabeth Berkley writhed on Kyle MacLachlan naked in a swimming pool, Riffel and Shelley Michelle cavorting around until it becomes a dance with bubbles floating around onscreen. None of this was necessary, but in terms of wanting to still make a film that was distinct, having both a production which was able to have this sexuality, and also wants to be a micro budget David Lynch melodrama, as most of it actually is, with occultist sub current, would have been compelling to witness.
Structurally, a lot of the film is melodrama boiled to the point of pure camp, but by the one hour point, the movie enters a severe slump. This is about the point of where Riffel and Shelley Michelle take most of the screen time. We need to talk about Michelle, because there are moments which are utterly strange, which do stand out even if the film because of its pace and length dulls the effect, such as her performance. In a film where characters can suddenly change attitudes to each other jarringly in the same scene, the older actress plays her character as having bi-polar mood swings, hating Penny in one moment, becoming romantically attracted to her the next, whilst Penny herself will gladly stab her in the back in the end. As if channelling later era Joan Crawford, she is perplexing alongside the content we see. Not only the naked dance in the poll together, but them seducing each other and talking about their families over hotdog sausages in an ordinary kitchen holding aloof one each in tongs.
After those two scenes however, the film somehow manages to be nearly two and a half hours without ever gaining anything from this. Tonally, like a perverse take on A Star Is Born (whichever version), the original was the tale of a price to pay for fame, one which was sordid and funny unintentionally and at times intentionally, with at least one uncomfortable plot point for the one likable character causing one to wake up whether it works or not. Penny's From Heaven in contrast never escalates like the prequel did or in terms of a micro budget oddity from that middle part. Again, this is a film which tries to have David Lynch content. It has random plot points which never get anywhere, like Penny having a twin sister who died in a "bubble bath" accident and whose ashes were turned into a diamond her surviving sister wears around her neck. It has a random snuff film subplot that is quickly disposed of after the scene it is introduced, where Godhardt offers her a role in one whilst pretending it is fake, showing such a production on a burnt DVD only for her unpaid maid, a likeable figure who yet wears skimpy fetish clothes and is attending detective school, to point out it is snuff and that the title is of Pagan ritual meaning. Some might consider this dream logic, but for once for me such an experience did feel like a jumbled assortment which never came together.
It neither helps that the original Showgirls itself was just as weird the longer you thought about it. Penny's From Heaven definately wanted to amplify what was ridiculous in the original context. The hotdog scene - shot digitally in a kitchen with long dialogue - is arch and feels deliberate. The original Showgirls, a high budget Hollywood film, has Saved by the Bell star Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon, an underrated actress, as rivals who briefly bond over eating the same brand of dog food they were both forced to eat when they were out of money. Showgirls, with its high production values and Las Vegas setting, is drenched in the neon and gaudy spectacle of its locations, with the casting of Berkley a huge factor, her performance between her childish tantrums to drowning chips in tomato ketchup being over the top already. Add to this someone like Kyle MacLachlan, who is not a stranger to deeply weird films in his career, and the film even by accident came from a place that was perplexing to imagine being a potential box office hit. The only plot of consistency to that original with the sequel is effectively rehashing Showgirl's plot, of Penny being corrupted in her goal to become a great dancer, then even echoing the original in encountering the driver who took her to the main film narrative at the beginning. Yet to get to that point, you have random points and dialogue, between the absurd and attempts to be profound, which are not as funny as they should be or memorable.
This is also in mind that there is at least one serious aspect to the film, that no male character comes off well, usually a bunch of scumbags who exploit women for sexual conquest, something which is a constant throughout the film and, whilst exaggerated, is not difficult to see. I come to this review without any malice to any of the performers either, especially as this was also a Kickstarter project that had a limited budget to work with. There is an absurd air to the production which is felt. Unfortunately, that knowing sense of itself proves a detriment to me; whilst fun is to be had at times, the two and a half hour epic of tangents crushes its memorable moments with all the many from dithering. It says a lot that this review is comically overlong to try to detail this, and it is a cruel joke to make that it befits the film it is covering, but that is a harsh truth in the end as well. Ultimately I lean towards a real ambivalence to the project which, again, I find particularly sad as this is a rare case of a female filmmaker, intentionally or unintentionally, entering this realm of strange micro-budget cinema, only for it to not be success in the slightest.
Abstract Spectrum: Camp/Eccentric/Lethargic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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1) HERE
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