Weird Wednesdays: Showgirls 2: Penny's from Heaven

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is one of the most infamous and misunderstood films of the 1990s, if not of all time. Marketed as the first (and to this date, only) major motion picture widely released with an NC-17 rating, it promised that the auteurs behind Basic Instinct (Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas) were going to deliver the most erotic experience the world had ever seen, a true inside look at the life of a Vegas dancer. Instead, audiences were given an experience that went toe-to-toe with Waterworld for “cinematic punchline movie of 1995,” a victim of the era when seemingly everyone in Hollywood, from pundits to late-night hosts and beyond, chose a movie to be that year’s whipping boy and hammered those jokes into the ground. Sometimes you get a truly indefensible movie like Gigli, but Showgirls was merely misunderstood. While Eszterhas likely turned in his usual misogynist shlock, the ever-satirical Verhoeven saw through the cracks of this script and made something of an absurdist sleazeball masterpiece that is beloved by every friend I have who ever made the decision to bare it all for an audience of strangers.

Arguably the scene-stealer of Showgirls was the side character Penny, played by Rena Riffel, whose storyline parallels the main character Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) on a very different path. Legend has it that originally she was supposed to play Nomi’s frenemy Cristal Connors (a role that eventually went to an admittedly brilliant Gina Gershon) but they decided she was too young to play an aging showgirl. Years later, Riffel asked Verhoeven for his blessing to make a sequel about Penny, and she got exactly that. No financial support, and presumably MGM did not give their official support to a sequel as well, but just like Nomi Malone, she had a dream and she went for it.

My personal history with Showgirls 2 goes back to what must be 2008 or 2009, when an announcement for it popped up seemingly out of nowhere. I forgot about it for years until one day in 2013 it was revealed that the movie was done and ready to purchase. The trailer looked incredibly low-rent and strange, but I kept an open mind, especially since I really enjoyed Rena Riffel in the first movie and was interested in seeing what her vision of this world was. In 2025, I finally saw it at a screening at Hyperreal Film Club, and it blew my mind. Just under a year later, I found myself willingly watching it again with a crowd for Weird Wednesday thanks to the mad programming prowess of Morgan Hyde, who was responsible for both screenings. This screening was joyously promoted by Ms. Riffel herself on social media, and she even recorded a special intro to play before the feature. The few of us who had seen this obscurity before knew what to expect over the next two and a half hours and we were excited to share that with new viewers.

The guy seated next to me walked out after 30 minutes.

As a person who firmly believes in seeing a movie through no matter how much I hate it (the only movie I’ve ever walked out of I still finished at home so I could be complete in my judgment), I’m not sure what led this person to throw in the towel so fast, but one would think that a movie already as maligned as the original Showgirls would at least be a baseline. The funny thing is…this movie is almost nothing like the first film. While both movies follow the story of a woman who hitches a ride to another town to pursue a dream of leading a crew of dancers, Verhoeven’s take is crass, loud, offensive, and grating, the kind of movie that made 90’s kids scramble for the remote anytime they heard a parent down the hallway because even if nobody was naked at that moment in time, someone in the movie was probably busy screaming and swearing. Riffel’s movie feels like if you remembered watching Showgirls’ infamous TV edit on VH1, but you were half asleep and part of the movie you were remembering was also Sylvester Stallone’s infamous Staying Alive, the forgotten sequel to Saturday Night Fever. Then imagine you told this experience to someone who had never seen a movie before. Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven feels like it could be the final product of what that person could think a movie was like.

Riffel’s character, Penny Slot, is where we last saw her, still in Vegas, working on a dance routine with Jimmy (Glenn Plummer, one of a few actors who return from the original) before deciding that her destiny lies elsewhere, even though she has no formal dance training. She has aspirations of leading a strange dance TV show called Stardancer, a show that, if you didn’t see that it was filming on an actual set, you’d assume was being filmed in someone’s bedroom. It’s a bafflingly low-rent show with no discernable point, where five women seemingly dance to the same song over and over again with no real choreography going on. It’s just the kind of baffling nonsense that defines this whole experience, and I have a theory that Coralie Fargeat was inspired by Stardancer when crafting Elisabeth Sparkle’s TV show in The Substance.

Much like Nomi, Penny hitches a ride (this time to LA) and gets ripped off. Then she finds herself at a murder scene, which results in her stealing the bloody dress from a Marilyn Monroe impersonator for reasons that are never quite explained. As a matter of fact, you could tag “for reasons that are never quite explained” to the end of most of the plot points here, so just take that as a throughline for the whole experience.

Movies are often (and erroneously) called Lynchian, but this movie earns it. From outright recreating the title sign shot from Mulholland Drive (in which Rena Riffel also appeared) onward, it’s clear that we’re dealing in a similar reality, a fascinatingly disjointed experience that would pair perfectly with Inland Empire, a long, disjointed tale of weird things happening to a woman just trying to make it in Hollywood. It’s not just that both movies are weird or dreamlike, it’s that they share a similar view of their world and an awareness that may not be evident on a first viewing. It feels smart about when it wants to be stupid and specific about when it wants to be weird. It replicates so much of the first movie through a bizarro lens, from our lead trying to take on the lead in a show wherein the star has broken her leg, right down to an almost shot-for-shot replication of the original movie’s absurd pool sex scene. It’s like Rena Riffel held up a circus mirror to the first movie and birthed a weirdo masterpiece for only $30,000, shot partially on film and partially on digital video. It may be a bit too long, but every 5-10 minutes you’ll be gasping and cackling at something you’ve never seen before, from Penny randomly having a scantily clad housecleaner who also happens to be studying Criminal Justice, to an erotic (?) dinner scene that, to paraphrase Jennifer Coolidge, will make you want a hot dog real bad.

I love this movie. I adore Rena Riffel. I think her script is filled with intentionally hilarious zingers (“I’m like a burger drive-thru, and instead of a burger, it’s a whore”) and her performance allows for some of the most intentionally airheaded moments ever filmed. If anything, the entire runtime of this movie is worth watching just for her delivery near the end of the movie when Jimmy tells her that she’s just playing dumb, a hilarious moment that defines the whole film’s ability to toe the line between willfully and innocently ridiculous. I can’t wait to hunt down Rena Riffel’s other directorial outings. I’m not sure about Penny Slot, but I’m pretty sure that Showgirls 2 is a gift from heaven. Doubly so for the woman who created it.

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