Paul Verhoeven was once a pretty respected director at the helm of sci-fi classics Total Recall and RoboCop . Then he re-teamed with Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, and the result was an especially bad, especially smutty movie called Showgirls . Luckily, it’s a hilariously bad movie (well, if you can get past the rape, dog food discussions and Kyle MacLachlan—who mysteriously still has a career—ejaculations), and has been celebrated as such since shortly after its 1995 release. This isn’t lost on the Art Theatre, who are holding a irony-riffic screening hosted by Rena Riffel, who played Penny in the picture. Riffel holds the distinction of also being in the considerably more tongue-in-cheek (but still bad) Striptease the following year, something you can ask her about in the Q&A following the “film.”
Fri., Jan. 29, 11:20 p.m., 2010
