An infamous box office bomb and target of critical ridicule, winner of both Worst Picture at the 1996 Razzie Awards and later Worst Picture of the Decade in 2000, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls was, for many years, a movie that few people liked, and fewer still would actually admit to liking. Over the ensuing decades, the film has slowly seen its reputation redeemed by a cult following that recognized and embraced it as a great American trashterpiece.

For such a widely disparaged movie, Showgirls has had a quite healthy life on home video catering to that cult audience. In 2004, MGM released it on DVD in a wonderfully kitschy box set called the V.I.P. Edition that packaged the film with bric-a-brac including shot glasses, a blindfold, and playing cards. A Blu-ray called the 15th Anniversary Sinsational Edition followed in 2010, with less elaborate but nonetheless suitably tacky artwork on the case and discs. Now the movie comes to 4K Ultra HD in a new collector’s edition that once again embraces its stature as a camp classic.

Showgirls is very much the type of movie that, if you don’t hate it, you probably love it. And if you love it, you definitely want to watch every frame of Verhoeven’s gaudy, obscene imagery in the highest resolution and quality possible.

Title:	Showgirls
Year of Release:	1995
Director:	Paul Verhoeven
Watched On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Also Available On:	Blu-ray Paramount+ Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Released at the very end of summer in 1995, Showgirls was the highly-anticipated follow-up project from the team of director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, whose smash hit erotic thriller Basic Instinct had been one of the highest-grossing films of 1992. Publicity surrounding its adult subject matter (Las Vegas strippers!) and Verhoeven’s insistence that it be released fully uncensored created a considerable stir both inside the filmmaking industry and among the general public. Showgirls was the first mainstream Hollywood studio production to be rated NC-17 by the MPAA and still get a wide release in cinemas and multiplexes all across America.

It was also an unqualified disaster. Critics tore the film to pieces. Audiences – the few who actually bothered to see it for themselves – howled in derision. The movie tanked at the box office and was used as a punching bag by comedians and late-night TV talk show hosts. Even decades afterwards, it’s still generally regarded as a laughingstock, and frequently appears near the top of any list of the worst movies ever made.

Feeling defensive about it, Verhoeven has typically blamed the movie’s failure on prudish American audiences being too scandalized by all the nudity and sexual content. Truth be told, that excuse is more than a little disingenuous. Most of the picture’s failings were the fault of the filmmakers themselves, and nobody should have been surprised at how negatively viewers would react to it. The plot is dumb, the lead character is unlikable, the dialogue is horrendous, and Verhoeven pushes the whole thing into realms of absurdity with over-the-top theatrics and obnoxious stylistic flourishes.

For a movie about sex, it’s also hilariously un-sexy and un-erotic. The nudity is all skeevy and the sex scenes are ridiculous. I can hardly imagine two human beings ever wanting to have sex the way the characters in this movie do, much less going through with it.

Showgirls is genuinely a bad movie by most objective criteria. Nevertheless, for all those reasons and more, it’s also a hugely fun movie when viewed in the right mindset. Its camp appeal is tremendous, and Eszterhas’ moronic dialogue is endlessly quotable. Some of my favorite lines include:

• “Dancin’ ain’t fuckin’.”
• “I’m erect. Why aren’t you erect?”
• “She looks better than a ten-inch dick.”
• “I used to love Doggy Chow.”

And the crème de la crème:

• “Must be weird not havin’ anybody cum on ya.”

That some of these are delivered by otherwise respectable, talented actors such as Gina Gershon, Kyle MacLachlan, Alan Rachins, and Robert Davi turns what should have been a forgettable piece of direct-to-video (or direct-to-Cinemax) garbage into something almost transcendent.

I’ve reviewed Showgirls previously (which I’ll link at the end of this article) and made a longer argument that I mostly still feel was written in the proper spirit of the movie’s entertainment value. At the same time, I’ll admit that I regret some of the things I wrote that may have come across as condescending or sexist, especially toward poor Elizabeth Berkley, who really never deserved the blame for gamely delivering exactly what Paul Verhoeven asked of her. While the bulk of that review was first written when I was pretty young and pretentious (and obnoxious), I have no excuse for leaving most of those comments in when I revised and updated the text a decade and a half later. I should’ve known better by then. I’d like to think that I’ve grown enough in the meantime to own up to some of my own poor behavior.

Regardless, I still love Showgirls and have no shame about that. I’ve watched it a bunch of times over the years and will happily do so again whenever the mood strikes.

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Showgirls was first released on Blu-ray in 2010 by MGM, via that studio’s distribution deal at the time with 20th Century Fox. The disc had pretty good a/v quality and a handful of fun bonus features. If not perfect, it was satisfying enough for just about any Showgirls fan.

In 2021, a label called Capelight brought the movie to 4K Ultra HD in Germany. Sadly, that release was criticized for a video transfer marred by excessive Digital Noise Reduction and other problems.

Two years later, American rights for the title have been licensed to Vinegar Syndrome, a boutique home video label that specializes in cult movies with a heavy focus on sleazy exploitation flicks. Showgirls may be one of the rare few big-budget Hollywood movies with mainstream name recognition that Vinegar Syndrome has ever handled, but the film’s subject matter and cult appeal fit the niche pretty nicely.

The new American 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release is a real collector’s item. The 3-disc set contains the movie on UHD, a copy on standard Blu-ray, and another Blu-ray disc for supplements. The discs are packaged in a large, sturdy box with fittingly trashy art on both the outside and inside.

Within the box is a thick booklet with three critical appreciation essays from some of the movie’s defenders. If I’m not mistaken, I believe the first two essays may be miscredited to the wrong authors. The essay called Supine and Sweaty is credited to Abbey Bender while the one called Stupid and Smart is credited to Adam Nayman, author of the book It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls. Yet the Supine and Sweaty piece opens with a reference to its writer having penned the It Doesn’t Suck book, which suggests that Vinegar Syndrome erroneously swapped the author names.

Acknowledging the complaints about the Capelight UHD, Vinegar Syndrome has remastered the film from what is claimed to be “an existing director approved 4K studio master,” “with no digital tinkering or smoothing plaguing cinematographer Jost Vacano’s stunning visuals.”

I don’t own the Capelight disc, but I still have the 2010 MGM Blu-ray. In doing a comparison. I found the Vinegar Syndrome master to have both plusses and minuses.

Off the bat, Vinegar Syndrome has dropped both the MGM and United Artists logos from the start of the film. I assume that’s due to some contractual reason, but it’s a little jarring to see the movie start right up without any studio logo in front.

In good news, the 2.35:1 image is noticeably sharper than the prior Blu-ray, which wasn’t too bad in that respect to start. Especially on the 4K disc, textural detail is often exemplary. Close-ups resolve every skin pore on an actor’s face. No DNR is evident. In fact, the movie is quite grainy throughout, but the grain looks natural and doesn’t exhibit any signs of digital tampering. I feel confident that this master shows us every bit of detail present on the Super 35 negative with nothing held back.

However, when I first loaded the disc into my player, I found the picture to be way too bright and washed-out at my projector’s normal calibrated settings. This is a problem I’ve run into occasionally, where certain content forces me to turn the projector’s tone-map settings down on a case-by-case basis. It doesn’t happen all that often, but Showgirls isn’t necessarily an anomaly in that regard, either. In this instance, even turning down the tone-mapping, I still felt that the picture’s contrast has been flattened. Black levels look a little elevated, and highlights that you’d expect to pop in High Dynamic Range, such as all the neon lights on the Las Vegas Strip, don’t. The disc doesn’t have much sense of HDR at all.

The biggest and most problematic difference between the two discs is color. To be frank, I don’t think either master gets it right. The 2010 MGM disc had a noticeable red push that oversaturated colors all through the movie. The Vinegar Syndrome 2023 transfer leans toward yellow instead, and over-corrects by undersaturating colors.

Right from the opening, the movie’s title looks hot pink on the old disc and a dull orange on the new one. I suspect that the correct color should fall somewhere in between.

This different color balance is present in every shot and every scene. The MGM disc is consistently too red, leaving flesh tones looking flushed and pinkish, while the Vinegar Syndrome disc is paler and more yellow.

Even conceding that neither version is likely right, I don’t find either disc unwatchable. MGM’s gaudy colors are appropriate for the Las Vegas setting, but Vinegar Syndrome’s yellow bias makes the movie feel more like a vintage sleaze flick. I’d be comfortable watching the movie either way. Which you find more tolerable will be a matter of personal preference.

That said, if I had worked on this master, I think I’d have made some different decisions regarding colors and contrast.

On my first listen, the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack sounded unchanged to me since the last Blu-ray. The movie has a very fun sound mix with a lot of immersive surround activity, nice dynamic range, and throbbing bass in the music during all the big set-pieces in the strip clubs or on the theater stage. I watched this disc shortly after another (very different) movie with a highly-touted Atmos remix that I frankly found sonically dull and fatiguing. I was much more impressed with the legacy audio on Showgirls.

Disappointingly, after I thought I was finished with the disc (and had written a first draft of this review), I was directed to a discussion where people had complained about the surround channels in the 5.1 track being very slightly out of sync with the front. I checked a few time codes on both the Vinegar Syndrome and MGM releases and can confirm a small audible difference between them, but I think you’d have to be much more musically inclined than I am to notice this on your own. Honestly, the only place where the Vinegar Syndrome track sounds wrong to me is at time code 28:48 (around 29:12 on the MGM), where the the song vocals are out of sync between front and rear. Yet even then, the song itself has so much digital processing and reverb that I personally would never have known it wasn’t supposed to sound that way without something to compare against.

A music person (especially a music engineer who listens for these things professionally) might pick up on this problem faster and be more bothered by it. I’m not going to dismiss that it’s a legitimate technical issue, but in my opinion, I doubt the average listener would ever notice.

Back in 1995, Showgirls played theatrically in Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS, and SDDS (then all still fairly new) or in Dolby Stereo for theaters that hadn’t yet upgraded to one of those formats. The latter is also represented on disc encoded in DTS-HD MA 2.0 format. The matrixed 2.0 track does not appear to have the surround sync issue when decoded by Dolby Surround Upmixer in my A/V receiver.

The UHD disc has only one supplement, but it’s terrific. The “Greatest Movie Ever Made” audio commentary by David Schmader, ported from the MGM release, is hilarious and pulls no punches in pointing out all the movie’s absurdities. At the same time, Schmader is an enthusiastic fan of the film with a very sincere appreciation for “the incredible density of failure that makes Showgirls sublime.” This is a person who truly gets, and is capable of articulating, why anyone might actually like Showgirls.

The first Blu-ray repeats that commentary, and also includes a theatrical trailer narrated by none other than Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime (really!). Why Vinegar Syndrome couldn’t put that trailer on the UHD too is a mystery to me.

Frustratingly, both movie discs are authored with a paltry seven chapter stops (called “Reels” in the menu) for the feature.

The final disc in the set is divided between Newly Produced Extras and Archival Extras. Despite being in the archival section, one of the best items on the disc had never been seen before on American home video. In a 2016 interview, director Paul Verhoeven admits that he didn’t really like the script, and only made the movie because another project he’d been working on (a historical epic called Crusades) fell apart. He also concedes, in retrospect, that his “hyperbolic” style pushed the movie too far over-the-top.

An old making-of featurette comes straight from the original Electronic Press Kit. Recycled from the MGM Blu-ray are a Showgirls Diary consisting of raw behind-the-scenes footage, and a lame lap dance tutorial from a pair of professional strippers.

Brand new features exclusive to this release include interviews with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, cinematographer Jost Vacano, the lighting designer for the stage show scenes, two of the film’s editors, actress Rena Riffel (Penny), and a pair of podcast hosts who have long championed the movie. The Eszterhas talk is surprisingly interesting and even insightful, at least until he gets sidetracked for a moment to rant about “cancel culture” at the end.

I’ve written before about how I rarely enjoy watching “special features,” but some of the content in this set is actually worth a fan’s time.

Late Addendum

I’ve been informed that, in addition to the other problems mentioned above, Vinegar Syndrom’s English subtitle track for this movie is plagued by typos, missing lines, and inaccurate timing with the audible dialogue.

Update: Vinegar Syndrome Response

On June 21, 2023, Vinegar Syndrome posted the following notice on Facebook:

Due to a recently discovered issue with the 5.1 surround track on our SHOWGIRLS Blu-ray and UHD discs, we will be implementing an automated replacement program for customers that purchased direct from VinegarSyndrome.com. If you purchased from another retailer, please contact us via our website with proof of purchase to qualify for the replacement discs. We expect the replacement Blu-ray and UHD discs to ship out in July. Thank you for understanding.

August 2023 Update

If a little later than the original estimate, I have received replacement discs from Vinegar Syndrome for both the 4K UHD and the Blu-ray, as well as a new booklet with the essay author names corrected.

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Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from standard Blu-ray editions of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.