Showgirls Exposed Director Defends His Film As Art

The first trailer for Showgirls Exposed, the sequel to Paul Verhoeven's camp 1995 film, drew no few snickers and chuckles when it hit the internet a few months ago. Last Friday, Twitch posted a second trailer, with the title "My Eyes Can Stand No More Than Four Minutes Of Marc Vorlander's SHOWGIRLS: EXPOSED." It isn't difficult to see why Twitch couldn't take much more: the footage looks terrible.

Cue director Marc Vorlander, who weighed in using the comment thread at Twitch to defend his movie as art.

Quick refresh: the film is "about a stripper who dies from a dose of contaminated batch of cocaine, and her brother who goes on a mission to find the responsible and enact revenge."

Vorlander might have been moved to speak up by editor Todd Brown's comment, "Vorlander claims to have made this film with a twenty million dollar budget and if that is true then he is surely the worst director on the face of the planet or, perhaps, the most expensive director ever to be saddled with such cheap equipment."

Indeed, while the budget is reportedly that high, the footage we've seen so far looks woefully cheap and uninspired. Given the logline for the film and the look of some of this footage, I can't help making a basic comparison to Gaspar Noe's Into the Void. And while Noe's movie certainly has detractors, watching the trailer for that movie against the new Showgirls stuff, I don't think there's any doubt at all about which is likely art and which is likely to be crap.

Vorlander replied in part,

The difference between controversial art and crap is very easy: controversial art is hated, panned, discussed..., crap simply dissapears into nowhere immediately, exactly like Rena Riffels project, that is also based on Showgirls and can be used in this case perfectly to demonstrate the difference...Thanks for passionately hating my work so less objective. I can not take this serious, but I appreciate it since it fits perfectly in the calculated behavior of self-styled movie critics that would not even detect art if you would engrave the word in their glasses to help them with it.

Brown replied in the best possible terms:

If you're making art here, you're doing it the same way Ed Wood did: Incompetently and by accident. And if the film has a lasting shelf life I suspect it'll be for the same reason. Because people enjoy laughing at it. Being a joke – even a very, very funny one – is not the same thing as being an artist. Right now, everything you've released from this film is a joke, not art...I'll be happy to take a look at the completed film once it's finished and if it turns out that you've made something worthwhile I'll happily come out and say I was wrong with my earlier comments.

Time to decide for yourself, or to make as much of a judgment call as possible from a few minutes of footage. Here's the new trailer, which is not in any way safe for work.