strip club

Striptease (1996)

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This year’s Oscar race for Best Actress has narrowed down to two fierce combatants: Demi Moore for her career-reviving role as an aged-out aerobics TV show host in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance vs. Mikey Madison for her career-making role as a wronged erotic dancer in Sean Baker’s Anora. Thankfully, they’re both great performances in great movies, but since this is Awards Season, they share a combined running time of 280 minutes, which is a lot of homework to squeeze in before this Sunday’s ceremony if you’ve fallen behind on the syllabus. So, at this point it’s probably best recommended to watch the one title that combines those two flavors in one easy-to-swallow, two-hour treat. 1996’s Striptease stars Demi Moore in a career-pinnacle role as a wronged erotic dancer, lacing up her stripper boots and spinning the poles years before Mikey Madison was born. It’s got none of The Substance‘s gross-out humor nor any of Anora‘s violent despair, but it does find the exact Venn-Diagram overlap where Moore & Madison’s awards-season spotlights currently intersect. It’s also, on its own terms, a total hoot.

Released just one year after Paul Verhoeven’s vicious camp classic Showgirls, Striptease is mostly remembered as a hollow echo of one of the great erotic thrillers of its era. Despite their shared strip club setting, the two movies are wildly different in tone & intent, which makes Striptease‘s lighter, fluffier approach hugely beneficial in retrospect. It’s shockingly cute & playful for its scummy setting—populated with perverted Congressmen & gropey strip club patrons—ultimately playing more like a precursor for Miss Congeniality than an echo of Showgirls. Like Madison in Anora, Moore stars as an erotic dancer who has to chase down her fuckboy ex to get what’s owed to her (in this case, custody of her young daughter) while suffering a series of screwball hijinks that are tonally incongruent with the violence threatened by the crime-world goons circling around her. Moore was no young upstart ingénue at the time of filming, though. Her performance was the highest paid actress gig in Hollywood history at the point of paycheck, and she deserved every penny. Unfortunately and unfairly, it was also the start of her professional decline that hadn’t fully recovered until this year’s Oscar campaign, three decades later.

On a technical level, Striptease excels foremost as a feat of mainstream screenwriting. In an opening scene that lasts less than a minute, we’re introduced to Demi Moore in a Floridian divorce court, pleading to a good-old-boy judge not to grant custody of her daughter to her pill-head ex (Robert Patrick), whose flagrant criminality caused her to lose her job as a secretary for the FBI. That’s some incredible efficiency. From there, we immediately jump eight weeks into her new career as the rising-star dancer at The Eager Beaver, a humble strip club that struggles to match the class-standard set by its better-funded rival, The Flesh Farm. In that club, Moore exclusively strips to Annie Lennox tunes in absurdly athletic, MTV-style strip routines that recall Adrian Lynne’s girl-on-the-go 80s classic Flashdance . . . with a lot more nudity. She also makes fast friends with a cast of adorable fellow dancers and their living-cartoon bodyguard, played by Ving Rhames in what might be his career-funniest performance. Every exchange between Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff is genuinely, warmly funny and hints to a screenplay that was refined trough several joke punch-ups by screenwriter-turned-director Andrew Bergman. That affable tone then goes a long way to soften the thriller elements that threaten to sour the good mood but never can, not in a movie where Ving Rhames trades quips with a pet monkey in perfect deadpan.

Burt Reynolds anchors the serious end of the plot in a deeply unserious role as a drunken lush Congressman with a panty fetish, who is so obsessed with Moore’s rising-star dancer that he at one point douses himself in Vaseline and huffs her dryer lint just to feel close to her. The role perfectly completes the comedic pervert trifecta established by his more celebrated parts in Boogie Nights & The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, balancing out the thriller requirements of his character with some vintage kinky kitsch. Because the Congressman is so obviously, publicly horny for Moore, his staff has to clean up the trail of witnesses to his depravity with murderous violence, which escalates the stakes of Moore’s custody struggles. To the Right-Wing Christian voter base, he’s a God-fearing soldier of Christ who uses his office to uphold Family Values in the Deep South. To anyone who’s ever been alone with him, he’s a dangerously horny freak with no functional sense of interpersonal decorum, a total menace. Meanwhile, Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff are portrayed as adorable women struggling to make do with “honest work.” Sure, a couple of them have the largest breast implants you’ll ever see outside of a Russ Meyer film, but they’re truly a wholesome bunch who love & support each other. It’s really very sweet, especially in comparison with the sleazy lawyers, politicians, and fixers in their orbit.

Demi Moore is more widely beloved for earlier 90s classics like Indecent Proposal & Ghost, but Striptease might be the best total-package encapsulation of what makes her great. She’s funny, she’s relatable, and she’s an exquisitely sculpted physical specimen that defies the usual limitations of the human body. A lot of the subtext of her role in The Substance relies on the audience’s understanding that she is a perfectly calibrated Hollywood actress who is still made to feel like she’s not living up to the impossible, illusionary standard set by her industry; Striptease puts her body on display in the same way, which had to have been a vulnerable act even at the height of her star power. The main struggle of Mikey Madison’s Oscar campaign this year is that she doesn’t have that built-in rapport with her audience, since she’s really just getting started. Her body is also being ogled in her star-making role, though, so it would be great to see her compare notes with Moore in a dual interview discussing what it’s like to work a stripper pole on a 50-foot movie screen with nowhere to hide from strangers’ eyes. You’d think that, because of the time of its release, Striptease would’ve been a lot more dismissive or gross about Moore’s fictional dancer than Anora was about Madison’s, but that’s really not the case. The two women were both given a chance to play these vulnerable, wronged sex workers with full heart, humor, and humanity, sidestepping the nastier, scuzzier tropes typically associated with the archetype. And they were both great at it.

-Brandon Ledet

Naughty New Orleans (1954)

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It’s Carnival time in New Orleans, when civic pride is its most glowingly beautiful. This is not always an easy city to live in, but it is an easy city to love, and Mardi Gras is our annual reminder of how wonderful it can be at its best. It’s also an annual reminder that its wonders & beauty have never changed in any significant way. The dozens of Carnival seasons I’ve celebrated all feel part of one grand hedonistic continuum, set against the unchanging backdrop of centuries-old French Quarter facades. It’s a rejuvenating ritual that helps me combat the “Ain’t dere no more” nostalgia of grumps who complain that the city isn’t the same as it used to be since Katrina, or since the ’70s, or since whenever that particular grump happened to be in their carefree twenties. People change, governments change, but the city stays the same, like how a river keeps its name even as new water flows through it.

There are much less expensive, exhausting ways to be reminded of this grand New Orleanian continuum than attending Mardi Gras in-person. You could also just watch a movie. Any picture filmed in the French Quarter, regardless of purpose or quality, is a documentary about the city’s temporal stasis. The opening montage of 1954’s semi-nudie cutie Naughty New Orleans takes that mission more seriously than most, explaining the allure of “the city that care forgot […] where life is lived at a different pace” in overly formal newsreel narration. Of course, this narration is illustrated by a slideshow of French Quarter architecture, which looks exactly the same now as it did 70 years ago, give or take changes in fashion among the day-drinking pedestrians and hand-painted advertisements that adorn it. That is, until the movie settles on Bourbon Street, which has been unofficially annexed from the city proper and now exclusively belongs to the tourists.

Naughty New Orleans is less of a feature film than it is a lengthy tourism ad for the Bourbon Street strip club strip. Its poster is drowning in ad copy, enticing viewers to “actually visit the heart of world-famed French Quarter” where we’ll be treated to “delightful adult entertainment, exactly as seen by millions of visitors from across the world [….] a sophisticated treat with the girls you’ll meet on Bourbon Street.” Bourbon Street is still anchored by strip bars and dance clubs today, but the “adult entertainment” dancing style therein has changed dramatically. If you want to see burlesque, you have to flock to nerdier spaces like The AllWays Lounge on St Claude Ave, where actual New Orleanians drink. Bourbon Street strip clubs are where men from Ohio get blackout drunk to half-remember pole dances that would’ve been identical to what’s offered back in Cleveland, just now with commemorative plastic beads.

A document of stripping-fashions past, Naughty New Orleans is a vintage Bourbon Street striptease revue set to somber jazz and routinely interrupted by hack comedy routines & whispers of a plot. Set inside the “Ain’t dere no more” Bourbon Street club The Moulin Rouge, the core of the film is a series of burlesque acts akin to what I’ve seen performed in more recent years at The AllWays and One Eyed Jacks. Occasionally, a dancer will perform a superheroic feat like simultaneously helicoptering four independent tassels on her bra & panties in opposing directions, but mostly they just put on and take off their gartered stockings one leg at a time, just like everybody else. If you can ignore the heavily laugh-tracked, light-on-actual-laughs comedy sketches that interrupt those dance routines, it’s a warmly pleasant, classically smutty good time.

The ideal version of Naughty New Orleans would’ve continued the overly verbose newsreel narration throughout and strictly stuck to the striptease revue format in the mondo-movie fashion of a Mondo Topless or a Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield. Instead, the film is flimsily held together by a story involving a star dancer’s deception of her out-of-town boyfriend, who believes she works as a “night secretary” until he stumbles into her headlining act at The Moulin Rouge. That’s it; that’s the entire story. The boyfriend is delighted instead of angered, to the dancer’s relief, then returns to his hometown while she pines from her French Quarter bedroom for another male visitor, leading the audience on through open implication. If the movie hadn’t bothered with that plotline and cut out the comedy routines to make more room for French Quarter strip shows & tourist photos, it might’ve really been something. Oh well.

Naughty New Orleans is best enjoyed as background noise on Tubi while folding laundry, only glancing up when the funeral-jazz hits the soundtrack so you know someone’s about to strip. The crowd reaction shots during those strip shows are a spectacle worth seeing in their own right, even if they are chaotically inserted images of toothless men & overdressed women repeating the same drunken, knowing grins for 77 haphazard minutes. It’s also a movie best enjoyed if you already have an affection for New Orleans as a temporal anomaly. You might not be able to recreate the exact night out advertised here on Bourbon Street in particular, but you can pass by these same buildings on your walk to a classic burlesque show on one of Bourbon’s less-crowded tributaries. The city is still—as the poster advertises—”tranquil by day, naughty by nite,” same as it ever was.

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2024: Queens of Crude

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There are few genres cozier than the talking-heads documentary about a subject you already love.  It’s like switching your brain off to reality TV, except you get the vague feeling that it’s somehow good for you.  In my case, I love kicking back to talking-heads docs about vintage smut – the kinds of movies that exist solely for Boomers to wax nostalgic on-camera about how grimy New York City was before Mayor Giuliani ruined everything.  This year has seen the wide-release of two notable documentaries in that specific cozy-viewing category: Queen of the Deuce and Carol Doda Topless at the Condor.  Split between opposite ends of the US coast, they both cover the professional lives & exploits of women who became infamous sex-industry titans of the 1960s & 70s.  One’s about a stripper, one’s about a porno distributor, and both were great low-effort watches to enjoy with a warm cup of tea on my couch.

Unsurprisingly, the more famous of the two women was profiled in the better documentary of the pair, as her talent for publicity left more archival material behind for her biographers to work with.  Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is a glowing portrait of “The Queen of Topless,” America’s first topless dancer. A woman of many professional aliases, Carol Doda was first publicized as “The Girl on the Floating Piano,” since she was the only dancer brave enough to do her go-go routine on the Condor night club’s hydraulically lifted & lowered piano.  She then transformed San Francisco’s striptease scene forever by being the first dancer brave enough to perform in the “monokini” (a topless swimsuit) and, thus, kickstarting “the topless craze” that made the city a global tourist destination for vice entertainment.  Her first topless performance also happened to coincide with San Francisco hosting that year’s Republican National Convention, which allows the movie to argue that the city’s strip club scene was an epicenter of 1960s Civil Rights activism, while also shamelessly indulging in the vintage softcore of Russ Meyer’s America.  Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is overflowing with smutty stock footage, interview clips, rock & roll performances, and mafia-connected murder conspiracies involving the infamous Floating Piano.  It’s got everything a bored pervert could want; it just doesn’t break any cinematic conventions delivering it.

Queen of the Deuce is not so fortunate.  Its subject, Chelly Wilson, was more of a behind-the-scenes player on the NYC porno theatre circuit, so you can only catch direct glimpses of her in home-video footage and a single tape-recorded interview.  When you hit the 2D animation in the first few minutes of the documentary, you might panic that there’s not enough archival material to justify a feature, but it is worth sticking around to get to know the singular Wilson . . . in other people’s words.  Queen of the Deuce is a real-life girlboss story about a Greek lesbian Holocaust survivor who became an unlikely porno magnate in 1970s NYC.  She worked her way up from importing Greek romances & comedies that reminded fellow immigrants of home to producing & screening hardcore pornography in cinemas like the all-male venue The Adonis (immortalized in the Golden Age porno A Night at The Adonis).  Her life is retold as a flip through her family photo album, with her grandchildren fondly reminiscing about the long climb up the porno-theatre stairs to grandma’s apartment and listening in on the “cabal of Greek witches” who would chain-smoke there – some of them lovers, all of them friends.  It’s not an especially impressive movie and it can barely drag itself across the finish line of a feature-length runtime, but it’s a warmly pleasant watch, especially if you’re the kind of audience who perks up in your chair when an interviewee drops names like Jamie Gillis, Al Goldstein, and Gerard Damiano.

Although Carol Doda Topless at the Condor was the better, more energetic documentary of the pair, I still got great cozy feelings from the vintage smut of Queen of the Deuce.  It may not have had the bottomless wealth of archival clips to work with as its West Coast counterpart, but it did have me reaching for my notebook more often to write down the titles of other vintage schlock to check out later, most notably a pantyhose-fetish roughie Wilson produced titled Scarf of Mist, Thigh of Satin and a vampire comedy her grandson filmed inside The Adonis titled Gargoyle and Goblin (which sadly appears to have only ever screened once at the NYU Student Film Fest).  As cinema in their own right, neither film is especially daring or groundbreaking; they both fall into the rigid template of the standard talking-heads doc without many bells & tassels getting in the way.  Their entire goal is to introduce you to badass women who briefly held power in small corners of the traditionally macho sex industry, so that they are not forgotten to time.  It is indeed a pleasure getting to know them, even if a simple one.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1957’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, finds Jayne Mansfield at the height of her manic bimbo superpowers.  Mansfield already strutted her outrageous proportions & bubbly-ditz persona to great comedic effect in her first collaboration with Looney Tunes legend Frank Tashlin, 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It, but she wasn’t allowed to step outside her usual cultural designation as the Great Value™ Marilyn Monroe in that picture.  In Rock Hunter, Mansfield finally strayed far enough outside Marilyn’s looming shadow to pioneer her own territory in high-femme comedic vamping. Mansfield is pure bimbo mayhem in Rock Hunter, turning every inhale of breath into an orgasmic squeal and every costume change into a mind-blowing reveal.  Instead of playing an exaggeration of Monroe, she’s playing an exaggeration of herself – complete with verbal, metatextual references to her Girl Can’t Help It stardom.  It’s like watching a pro wrestler get assigned a go-nowhere, bad-vibes gimmick and then somehow win over the crowd by playing it as a ludicrous self-caricature.  It’s the film where she out-Marilyned Marilyn to such an absurd extreme that the comparison is obliterated entirely. 

No viewing of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is complete without also having seen its rock ‘n roll sister film The Girl Can’t Help It, but if you’ve already graduated from The Frank Tashlin School of Jayne Mansfield Studies, there’s still plenty more of Mansfield’s career left to explore.  Mansfield has a few dozen credits to her name on IMDb, ranging from dead-serious noirs to ribald slapstick comedies.  None that I have seen can compete with the sublime silliness of her collaborations with Tashlin, but there’s still more to Mansfield’s screen persona than those two consecutive roles.  So, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to bask in more of her weaponized bimbo glamour.

The Wayward Bus (1957)

In 1957’s The Wayward Bus, Mansfield plays a famous stripper on the run, dodging unwanted nudie magazine notoriety on a bumpy bus trip down to a Mexican hideout.  That makes the film sound a lot lighter & sillier than it is in practice, which is evident as soon as the title card announces its literary prestige as “John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus,” a serious drama for serious adults.  Mansfield stars opposite several character actors running away from their problems on the titular Sweetheart bus (including a young Joan Collins as the bus driver’s violently alcoholic wife), but much of the drama revolves around how difficult it is for her fellow passengers to avert their eyes from her striking figure.  It’s both the only movie I’ve seen where Jayne Mansfield was actually asked to Act, and the only one where her outrageous silhouette was treated as a liability instead of a superpower.  A sordid little stage drama set in motion by the magic of rear protection in the bus’s windows, The Wayward Bus suffered a long line of production delays that eventually made room for Mansfield in the cast after cycling through bigger-name actors like Marlon Brando, Gene Tierney, Joanne Woodward, Robert Mitchum, and Shelley Winters, despite being a relatively standard-issue studio picture.  That delay was a blessing in giving Mansfield some space to test out her dramatic chops, but also a curse in that it pushed its release to one year after Monroe’s similar roadside noir Bus Stop – to which it was inevitably, unfavorably compared in the press.

Too Hot to Handle (1960)

Mansfield also plays a jaded, troubled stripper in 1960’s Too Hot to Handle (alternately titled Playgirl After Dark), but she’s not asked to be as dramatically vulnerable here.  Her character has graduated from stripper to stripper-manager at the seedy nightclub The Pink Flamingo, run by her doomed gangster boyfriend (and Christopher Lee as the gangster’s disturbingly young, handsome, mustachioed right-hand man).  In genre terms, this film finds Mansfield working in the sex comedy realm that made her famous, but its British sensibilities afford it more of a dry martini-soaked sarcasm than what you’ll find in Tashlin’s sugar-addled farces.  With underplayed zingers like “That’s a very nice dress you’ve nearly got on,” it’s not a knee-slapper so much as it’s a muted chuckler, and so Mansfield gets a chance to tone down her absurd femme-caricature persona to a smokier, more detached register.  Even if not consistently hilarious, it’s shocking that this day-drunk British noir bothers to be as wryly funny as it is, since its main attraction is obviously the opportunity to watch Jayne Mansfield model outrageously tight, see-through outfits while puffing on the world’s longest cigarette holder.  Self-billed as an “expose of sexy, sordid Soho, England’s greatest shame,” the film relies heavily on her physical presence to attract an audience, going as far as to rile up censors with completely transparent gowns that got it harshly edited in America.  The fact that it manages to land a few one-liners on top of that drunken burlesque act is just lagniappe.

Promises! Promises! (1963)

It turns out see-through gowns are not enough to keep your horndog audience coming back forever.  Eventually, you’ve got to take off the gowns entirely.  While Mansfield reached her highest artistic peaks in her Frank Tashlin collaborations, she might be better known for her starring role in the mainstream nudie cutie Promises! Promises!, which delivered on its Playboy-publicized promise to become the first sound-era Hollywood film to feature a nude female star.  In the very first scene of Promises! Promises!, Mansfield is introduced taking a bubble bath, making sure to rise above the suds just enough to give the audience a full look at her outrageous, unclothed figure.  In the next, she disrobes of that pretense, going shamelessly topless as if Russ Meyer were leering behind the camera.  Unfortunately, the rest of the picture does not have the magic Russ Meyer touch.  You might wonder what this cornball sex comedy is going to do with its remaining 70 minutes after it gets Mansfield’s publicity-stunt nude scenes out of the way in the first 4.  The answer, apparently, is shamelessly repeat those same images in clunky dream sequences to milk them for all their worth.  The schticky German psychologists, sissy hairdressers, and stock footage of cruise ship shuffleboard players that pad out the rest of this farce are desperate & dire, and the only genuine fun to be found in the entire picture is in Mansfield’s two brief, breathy musical numbers.  Still, being the first actress to go nude in a mainstream, post-Hays Code Hollywood is a major distinction Mansfield could claim that her professional superior Marilyn Monroe could not (if not only because Monroe’s own attempt at that ground-breaking achievement, Something’s Got to Give, was derailed by the star’s tragic death). Unfortunately, that only helps relieve some of the sting of Marilyn’s own boat-ride farce Gentlemen Prefer Blondes being one of the most beloved comedies of all time while Promises! Promises! is mostly just a giant pile of ship.

-Brandon Ledet

JLo: All-American Hustler

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It’s almost undeniable that the most All-American event on the cultural calendar is the Super Bowl: a championship football game adored for its TV ads, its excessive snack food rituals, and its pop music spectacle intermission. There’s a reason why so much emphasis is placed on who will sing the National Anthem that kicks off the game every year (and how well they did or didn’t perform); the event is just as much a celebration of American culture as it is a championship football game. I’ve gradually stopped watching football over the years as pro wrestling, the Oscars, and RuPaul’s Drag Race have replaced it as my competitive sports events of choice, but even I still tune in for the Super Bowl Halftime Show most years due to my overriding interest in pop culture at large. This year was a great one! Whoever booked the game’s intermission entertainment made great use of its Miami venue by featuring Latinx entertainers like Shakira & Bad Bunny, representing an often-overlooked facet of the American cultural fabric that’s been especially politically charged under the xenophobic reign of the Trump Presidency. The centerpiece of this celebratory Latinx protest display was a pop music medley from singer-dancer-movie-star Jennifer Lopez, whose section of the show took the biggest, most direct political jabs of the event – while also conjuring Lopez’s most recent onscreen persona as a modern marvel of Cinema in particular.

The reason I’m talking about football & pop music on a movie blog is that JLo’s Halftime Show performance was greatly influenced by her recent movie-stealing role in the film Hustlers. Adapted from a New York Magazine article chronicling a real-life series of crimes, the film is a post-2008 Financial Crisis period piece about a ring of strip club employees who drugged & fleeced their wealthy Wall Street clientele for tens of thousands of dollars. Told in a flashback style directly borrowed from GoodFellas, the film is ostensibly aligned with the POV of its top-billed narrator character, played by Constance Wu. In practice, Wu is the lead performer in name only. As soon as Jennifer Lopez saunters onto the screen to perform a strip routine to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” the movie is entirely her show. Both the audience & Wu herself are fixated on the spectacle of the almighty JLo as she shows us the ropes – first on the gymnastic basics of working a stripper pole, then on the basics of fraudulently running up transactions on an unconscious client’s credit card. Some of Wu’s fixation on JLo’s Stripper Queen persona is explained to be a result of her character’s Mommy Issues (a refreshing change of course from cinema’s usual Daddy Issues fixation among macho narrators), but that almost feels like overkill. It’s self-evident; no explanation necessary. Even much-advertised cameo roles from major pop music personalities like Lizzo & Cardi B do little to distract from JLo’s nuclear charisma. She just casually walks away with the entire movie tucked into her overpriced designer handbag, never breaking a sweat.

Early in Hustlers, Constance Wu’s narrator pontificates that “This whole country is a strip club,” drawing a parallel between her industry’s sexual hustling to the “stolen money” of Wall Street’s own daily hustles. Nothing could better illustrate America’s function as the world’s largest strip club than JLo performing from atop a stripper pole at the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Bringing her newfound exotic dancer skills from the Hustlers set to that All-American pop music venue was a brilliant maneuver, as she then had an entire nation gawking at her in awe the way Wu & Hustlers‘s (much smaller) audience had already been on the hook. And what did she do with this amplified, captivated audience? She redirected our eyeballs to Latinx children posing in cages on the football field, peeling back the pop culture escapism of Super Bowl spectacle to refresh our horror with ICE’s abuses in the ongoing refugee border crisis. JLo even emerged from one of her many onstage costume changes during her short set in a fur coat/body suit combo outfit that directly recalled her Hustlers costuming, except redesigned to resemble the American flag. In the movie, she welcomes Constance Wu into the warmth of her coat, purring “Climb into my fur.” On the stage, she opens her All-American fur in the same fashion, only to reveal that it’s a Puerto Rican flag on its reverse side – further emphasizing the Latinx prominence in America’s DNA that’s often dismissed by the country’s falsely “patriotic” right-wing goblins. This whole country is a strip club, and it was wonderful to see it get so flagrantly hustled by a performer who’s been in her prime for decades, with no signs of slowing down.

The only way Jo’s Halftime Show performance could have been more blatantly political is if she had ripped a picture of Donald Trump in half, à la Sinead O’Connor on SNL (although the political effectiveness of either performance is up for debate). The only way it could have been more directly tied to her movie-stealing, Oscars-snubbed persona in Hustlers is if she had looked directly into the camera to ask the entire country, “Doesn’t money make you horny?” You can even see her Hustlers persona echoed in how easily she steals the show from Shakira, who’s just as capable of a singer & dancer as Constance Wu is an actor. Shakira is both a sex bomb & a total goofball, positively lighting up that Super Bowl stage with her spectacular hip gyrations, her to-the-camera tongue-wagging, and her comically over-the-top song selections (like choosing to open with the werewolf anthem “She-Wolf”). As the first & longest sustained performer on that stage, Shakira should technically be positioned as the central star of the Halftime Show, with Lopez slotted as a special guest star. Instead, as with in Hustlers, JLo’s blinding charisma easily overpowers Shakira’s own formidable presence – emerging as the de facto star of the show. If the Super Bowl is going to stand as an annual distillation of American culture, it’s only appropriate that the event acknowledge the country’s Latinx contingent through artists like Shakira & JLo as well as the hedonistic exploitation & excess detailed in Hustlers – both of which are American as fuck. It’s your patriotic duty to give it a watch even if you care way more about movies & pop music than you care about football:

-Brandon Ledet

Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls (1989)

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Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls is my favorite kind of unnecessary horror sequel. Since the first film in Katt Shea’s unashamed sleaze franchise is a self-contained murder mystery mostly comprised of 15(!!!) strip routines and a few gruesome murders, no one was exactly salivating for a follow-up – at least not for narrative reasons. The only reason the sequel was made in the first place (besides the surprise financial success of its predecessor) is that Roger Corman had a strip club set leftover from an unrelated production for a few days before it was going to be dismantled. Having wrapped filming her previous picture Dance of the Damned on a Saturday and rushed unprepared into filming this movie on the leftover set with no script the following Monday, Shea found herself working in the Corman machine at its most budget-efficient but most creatively restrained. She used the few days of strip club access to film as many dance routines as she could, then retroactively churned out a screenplay to tie them together in the following weeks. The result is total madness, a disjointed sense of reality that transforms the original serial-killer-of-strippers formula of Stripped to Kill into something much more surreal & directly from the id. It’s the same madhouse horror sequel approach as films like Slumber Party Massacre 2, Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2, and Poltergeist III: avoiding rote repetition of its predecessor by completely letting go of reality and indulging in an over-the-top free-for-all of nightmare logic. The fact that it was written in a rush after it already started filming only adds to its surrealist pleasures, like how the best SNL skits are the nonsensical ones written in a 3 a.m. state of delirium.

Live Girls opens with its best scene. A frightened stripper in 80s hairspray & lingerie dances in frightened flight as a room full of mysterious nightmare figures reach out to handle & harm her. Ominous winds roar on the soundtrack as if we had accidentally stumbled into David Lynch’s wet dreams. The dance routine itself is less akin to the straightforward LA strip club acts of the previous film than it is to the interpretive dance madness of The Red Shoes or any Kate Bush music video you can conjure (especially the one where Bush pays homage to The Red Shoes). As early as that opening, it’s clear that Live Girls has abandoned the gritty real-world crime drama of Stripped to Kill for a logically looser MTV aesthetic, caring little for how plausible its strip routines & murder spree play onscreen as long as they’re “cool.” The dance numbers are less frequent here (they were rushed to accommodate a soon-to-disappear set, after all), but they’re also more memorably bizarre. A tag-team lion tamer act, a fire-breathing routine with a flaming stripper pole, and an oddly juvenile ballerina number feel just as detached from reality as the frequent dream-sequence murders that are expressed in full-on interpretive dance. Although the MTV nightmare logic of the opening sequence does persist throughout, though, the film never quite matches the Kate Bush striptease madness of its opening, which concludes with a masked killer taking out their first stripper victim with a razor blade kiss. The howling winds of this opening nightmare do return in subsequent stripper-killing dreams, but none are quite as delirious or deranged as the first. Still, I was too immediately enamored for my mood to drop too significantly as the movie calmed down to stage a proper murder mystery.

Besides adding some heightened surrealism to its never-ending parade of strip routines, the dream logic conceit of Live Girls also improves on the Stripped to Kill formula by obscuring the misogyny of its stripper-killing violence. In this sequel, the kills are staged in the context of a stripper’s half-remembered dreams as she mentally unravels. Amidst the dream sequences of interpretive dance, a masked killer with a razor blade secured in their mouth slices stripper victims on the face & neck with a deadly kiss and our frazzled protagonist wakes with a mouth full of blood & no recollection of the hours since she blacked out. The ultimate reveal of the killer’s identity is unfortunately just as politically #problematic here as it was at the conclusion of the previous film. The difference is that the kills leading up to it aren’t nearly as brutally misogynistic. I respect the unembarrassed sleaze of Stripped to Kill in concept, but the way that film alternates between gawking at women’s bodies as sexual objects and then gawking at those same bodies being mangled and torn apart left me a little queasy at times. Here, both the sex and the violence are less reminiscent of real-world misogyny and play more like a horny teenager’s nightmare than a proper thriller. Disembodied hands reach through a series of glory holes on a shiny zebra-striped wall to grab a stripper as she’s tormented by the howling wind. Occultist strippers with face-obscuring masks & robes dance erratic circles around a victim before they’re kissed to death at the business end of a fog machine. Both Stripped to Kill films end on a morally offensive queerphobic twist, but only the first is truly morally grotesque long before it gets there. This follow up is loopy & goofy in all the places where its predecessor is grimy & gruesome, endearingly so. The neon lights & hairspray-fried mops of curls didn’t change between the two films, but the worlds they decorate feel like they belong to entirely separate realms – the real & the unreal, the grotesque & the delirious.

In its most surreal moments, Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls is like a psychedelic, Kate Bush-inspired porno where the performers took too many hallucinogens and accidentally slipped into interpretative dance when the script said they should bone. At its worst it’s low-energy Skinemax sleaze, which can be charming in its own way. In either instance, it’s way more entertaining & bizarre than the first Stripped to Kill film, despite their shared penchant for poorly aged, queerphobic conclusions. Even if the final twist spoils the fun, you do have to admire the distinct delirium of the picture, which it shares with other rushed-through-production Corman classics like Blood Bath, Bucket of Blood, and Little Shop of Horrors. This addition to that haphazard canon of barely coherent projects that somehow lucked into cult status is a little more adherent to the bare flesh & neon lighting of MTV-era sleaze than its cohorts, but it fits right in among the best of ‘em all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

American Mary (2012)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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Maybe the reason that the late 90s, early 00s nu metal Hot Topic mall goth aesthetic hasn’t yet returned in any significant, nostalgic way is that it never died a proper death. Not that I’d recommend the experience, but if you tuned in to a modern rock radio station, you’ll notice that not much has changed in the last fifteen years. A couple outliers like Tame Impala & The Black Keys aside, a lot of mainstream hard rock sounds like the kind of dreck I would’ve greedily eaten up in my KoЯn/Slipknot/Limp Bizkit-loving days as a wee lad. That’s partly why the half-hearted, cheap-o slasher American Mary feels so awkwardly uncool. If it were released closer to 1999, it’d be a lot more likely to deserve a former mall goth cult following like the actually-pretty-great werewolf movie Ginger Snaps. Since it was released just three years ago, however, the film feels like stale leftovers from a nu metal yesteryear. It’s not just in the shitty soundtrack either. The whole film feels like it could’ve been jointly sponsored by Hot Topic, Spencer’s, The Family Values Tour, and Ozzfest. Obviously, there’s still a market for that aesthetic, but I personally found it difficult to stomach.

The titular Mary in this nostalgia trip to a time no one misses is a young medical student who falls down the bizarre rabbit hole of performing voluntary body modification procedures thanks to a strip club named Bourbon-a-Go-Go. Unable to support herself financially while attending medical school, Mary auditions to be a stripper at Bourbon-a-Go-Go & somehow the interview devolves into her performing life-saving surgery in her fancy lingerie, a ridiculous display I suppose was meant to be titillation for surgery fetishists. It certainly didn’t deliver anything valuable in terms of gore. Shortly after this strange turn in her life, Mary is drugged & raped at a mentor surgeon’s house party (a moment that feels grotesquely out of place in what is for the most part a horror comedy) and the film then briefly combines my two all-time least favorite movie genres: the rape revenge & the torture porn. Fun. All of this nonsense eventually leads to Mary finding a second life as an unlicensed body modification surgeon who specializes in tongue splitting, teeth filing, implants, gential modification, voluntary amputation, and the like. She spends the rest of the film trying to balance this newfound vocation with the day-to-day complications of a besides-the-point budding romance & police investigation. Gore-light, gothy hijinks ensue.

To her credit, the actress who plays Mary (Katharine Isabelle, who also played Ginger in the aforementioned Ginger Snaps, appropriately enough) is mostly charming here, with her mod goth bangs & ironic, Daria Morgendorffer-style sense of emotionally-detached humor. Other female characters, including a woman who’s had more than a dozen elective procedures in order to look like her favorite cartoon character & a fetish model who wants to become as flat as a Barbie doll to sidestep sexual objectification, are equally fascinating. What doesn’t work is the grotesquely macho world that surrounds them. The film’s tendency towards a meat head nu metal aesthetic opens it up to leering lipstick lesbianism, thoroughly unsexy fellatio, sexual assault, and trashy-at-best strip teases that ruin the good vibes that a few interesting characters here or there can’t sustain on their own. American Mary desperately wants to be an ironically detached horror comedy & sometimes it works. The fact that our lovely mod goth protagonist earns the moniker “Bloody Mary” is amusing, as are other tossed-off details like an early scene where a mentor praises her surgical skills with the line, “You’re going to make a great slasher.” Most of the film is far from self-aware in this way, though, and instead drags on endlessly through macho goth nonsense sure to please every thirteen year old out there who’s still rocking studded bracelets & wallet chains, but not many others.

For the morbidly curious looking to dive into this dated aesthetic, I recommend instead checking out the somewhat-similar-in-tone Starry Eyes, in which a young actress falls into the rabbit hole of Hollywood casting couch politics. Starry Eyes is far from a horror comedy, but its earnestness earns much more interesting, bizarrely grotesque results than American Mary‘s overbearing sense of detachment. Starry Eyes has a lot of American Mary‘s nu metal posturings, but puts them to much better use, going for full-on horror instead of this half-ironic, half-brutal, fully-tepid stinker with a late 90s hangover.

-Brandon Ledet