The Greatest Movie...

... where we find out just how you would fuck a Penny?

Showgirls 2: Penny's From Heaven (2011)

Apparently it involves under-cooked hot dogs and Mardi Gras masks. I want to go back to who I was before I knew this, but I cannot.

At a certain point, I'm not sure I could pin-point where it is exactly, but at a certain point it becomes clear that you, the viewer of Showgirls 2: Penny's From Heaven, have actually been made to lose your mind. It's like... well I was going to say it's like the sexy version of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but it's not ever the slightest bit sexy. So it's like the unsexy version of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, I guess. That makes as much sense as anything I could say. But I really felt that my brain had melted out of my ears by the time the credits rolled after some, oh, two plus hours. I'll co-sign what Rich at Gawker said about the movie - "Some of the sheer amazement at Showgirls 2 comes from scenes that last so long, it feels like time has stopped."

Its creator Rena Riffel, who plays the titular - yes I said that word, make of it what you may - Penny, was also in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (which gets riffed upon - or is that Riffel'd upon? - during the film) and I feel as if that was what she was setting out to emulate more than Paul Verhoeven's oeuvre. There are images here of such flat Lynchian bizarreness that they're probably now what's going to flash through my mind as I die. I can only pray that "Here's bubbles..." are my last words. I'm not even joking - I haven't felt this dazed and out of sorts after a movie ended since Inland Empire. If a giant bunny rabbit had wandered through the background I wouldn't have been surprised in the slightest. And I'm pretty sure that if Rena shows up on my doorstep and says whatever code-word's been burned into my brain, I will totally become a robot assassin for her.