Our current Movie of the Month, 1983’s A Night in Heaven is an oddly forgotten studio drama about a bored Floridian college professor who cheats on her husband with a young student, who happens to moonlight as a male stripper.  Yes, a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype before I was born, and it’s somehow not a certified cult classic (yet), even though it helped popularize the eternal synthpop banger “Obsession”.  Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the complications & safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess.  In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter, so I guess it all evens out.

A Night in Heaven was released decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper movies, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print obscurity instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite.  However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful.  There’s nothing especially vulgar or raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to stripper Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front.  Still, it’s still shocking to see a retro movie so sincerely stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for Hollywood filmmaking.  It’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club movie with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales.  Unfortunately, there aren’t many other high-profile male stripper movies to recommend alongside A Night in Heaven as a result, but there are plenty of other contemporary movies set in 1980s strip clubs that match & complement its vintage sleaze aesthetic.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more 80s stripper movies that share in its distinctly retro grime & glamour.

Flashdance (1983)

A Night in Heaven’s biggest hurdle to earning long-term cult status might have been its short-term battle with Flashdance.  Adrian Lyne’s aspirational welder-by-day-stripper-by-night story of a wannabe ballerina making her way in The Big City overshadowed A Night in Heaven so completely that People Magazine dubbed the latter film “Flashdunce” in its review.  It’s not hard to see why.  While A Night in Heaven is charming in its internal identity crisis, swinging wildly in genre & tone from scene to scene, Flashdance knows exactly what movie it wants to be and leaps gams first towards that goal.  Flashdance is just as manically ambitious as its 18-year-old-with-three-jobs protagonist, hammering away at its early MTV fantasy aesthetic so hard in every scene that it’s practically a feature length music video.  When Jennifer Beals welds, she’s surrounded by fantastical splashes of sparks & purple smoke.  When she strips, the physical stage disappears to allow her (and her wig-wearing body doubles) to bounce around impossible otherworldly voids.  When she practices ballet, she doesn’t really.  She reinvents the artform of dance entirely, giving physical expression to a hip cassette tape soundtrack you’re directed to buy on your trip home from the theatre.  A Night in Heaven can’t help but look small & dorky next to the biggest strip club fantasy movie of 1983, partly because Flashdance is one of the coolest-looking movies ever made.

I’m saying all this as a general skeptic of Adrian Lyne’s signature works, too.  Flashdance delivers all of the messy, sweaty erotica of Lyne’s trademark sex thrillers, except with the bitter misogyny swapped out for high-style MTV escapism.  It’s unquestionably his best film, challenged only by Jacob’s Ladder.  It’s also very likely the best strip club movie of the 1980s, even if it has to pause mid-film to contrast its impossible high-art erotic dance gallery space against a much more realistic, grubby strip club where women actually take their clothes off for money.

Stripper (1986)

There aren’t many 80s stripper movies that demand to be taken as seriously as Stripper.  The semi-staged hangout documentary was directed by Pumping Iron producer Jerome Gary, presenting a sincere portrait of North American strippers as artists & craftswomen doing their best to make a living.  The six women profiled on camera are all seemingly genuine & passionate in their explanations of why they strip for money, interviewed in front of a blank Sears family photo backdrop to help dampen the subject’s inherent salaciousness.  At the same time, the documentary is structured around a stripper convention’s fictional Golden G-String competition that’s inorganically staged for the camera, so that the women have a goal to achieve beyond day-to-day survival.  That in-film kayfabe likely mattered a lot more to serious film critics of the 1980s, which is likely why it isn’t as widely canonized as its bodybuilding equivalents in the Pumping Iron series.  Its flagrant dishonesty matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, though, where its mixture of high artifice & subcultural anthropology feels distinctly ahead of its time.  Modern audiences are well used to parsing out what’s real and what’s kayfabe in semi-documentary television, and it’s fascinating to see that format pioneered in such a distinct subcultural context at such a distinct era in the stripping profession.

Stripper is just as self-conflicted in its tone as A Night in Heaven.  It wants to present its titular profession as just another working-class side job, providing a borderline wholesome public service that’s been an American pastime since the old-timey saloon days of its sepia tone photographs.  It can’t help but lean into the glam & smut of its 80s strip club milieu, though, and the only inclusion of male strippers among its hot-babe interviewees are the drunk oglers who join them onstage in sarcastic pantomime.  On a documentary level, it’s about as academically rigorous as any random episode of HBO Real Sex, but it still makes for great peoplewatching & anthropological texture if you’re willing to peer beyond the sheer veil of fantasy in its onstage strip routines.

Vamp (1986)

It’s a shame that there aren’t many other male-stripper movies of the era to lump in with A Night in Heaven, since that’s the major detail that makes the film special.  A Night in Heaven was released in an era when light-hearted erotica was defined by frat bro boner comedies like Animal House, Porky’s, and Revenge of the Nerds, when most sex objects depicted onscreen were women, not student-by-day-gigolo-by-night college age twinks.  So, if you’re going to pair A Night in Heaven with one post-Porky’s boner comedy about strippers, you might as well watch Vamp: the one where a gang of neon-lit vampire strippers led by Grace Jones torture the horndog frat boy protagonists.  Often cited as a prototype for From Dusk til Dawn the way A Night in Heaven is a prototype for Magic Mike, Vamp is a cutesy horror comedy that can only ogle women’s bodies for so long before those bodies transform into bloodsucking ghouls and turn the tables of power.  In a way, it’s got the same older women preying on younger men sexual dynamic of our Movie of the Month, but the “preying” just happens to be a lot more literal & monstrous.

There’s nothing especially innovative or unique about Vamp, at least not once you get past Grace Jones’s centerpiece strip routine (which features set & body paint designs by legendary artist Keith Haring).  It’s basically a David DeCoteau movie with a proper budget, a pure-80s novelty.  As a vibe check of what audiences most stripper media served in that era, though, it’s at least a pleasant novelty – not least of all because that audience’s frat boy avatars are punished for their sins by one of the coolest, most powerful women to ever grace the stage.

-Brandon Ledet