"Striptease" is a multi-award winning picture. Unfortunately, these are Razzie Awards---awards given for god-awful films and performances. It received an amazing seven nominations and took home six awards--including Worst Movie and Worst Actress! This puts the film is a very unique league...as few films have been nominated or won like "Striptease". This alone is the reason I watched the film...I was curious how bad this bad movie could be.
The film is about Erin, a divorced mother whose husband is a trashy criminal...yet we are to believe the judge game HIM custody. Regardless, this ex- made sure she lost her job and now she has been 'forced' to become a stripper. With no experience, she instantly becomes a star attraction and the men in the club go positively insane when she dances. During one of these times, a crazy congressman (Burt Reynolds) gets out of control and soon all sorts of unforeseen situations result.
So is this really a bad film? But what's surprising is that it's basically an ultra-low budget trash film...or that's what it looks like. Yet, inexplicably, the movie had a HUGE budget--including $12,000,000 for its star, Demi Moore!! Why they chose her, I have no idea as her appearing semi-naked didn't help the film to become a success. Instead, they could have easily gotten a cut-rate stripper and saved a LOT of money. And I think this huge budget and big studio treatment for essentially a trash film is why it got so many Razzies. If it was just some cut-rate trash film, no one would have noticed it and the film would have quickly disappeared.
The film suffers because it's a bizarro script that seldom makes sense, has characters who simply are caricatures instead of believable members of the human race and because the film cannot decide what it wants to be. Is it a comedy? Is it a raunchy film? Is it a drama about a mother trying to regain custody of her kid? Is it a murder mystery? Is it a film about politics and the abuse of power? Is it an episode of "The Jerry Springer Show"? Any one of these might have worked...but together the film is just brain-achingingly weird and nonsensical--especially by the very end. Not bad enough to have earned 6 Razzies...but pretty bad.
The film is about Erin, a divorced mother whose husband is a trashy criminal...yet we are to believe the judge game HIM custody. Regardless, this ex- made sure she lost her job and now she has been 'forced' to become a stripper. With no experience, she instantly becomes a star attraction and the men in the club go positively insane when she dances. During one of these times, a crazy congressman (Burt Reynolds) gets out of control and soon all sorts of unforeseen situations result.
So is this really a bad film? But what's surprising is that it's basically an ultra-low budget trash film...or that's what it looks like. Yet, inexplicably, the movie had a HUGE budget--including $12,000,000 for its star, Demi Moore!! Why they chose her, I have no idea as her appearing semi-naked didn't help the film to become a success. Instead, they could have easily gotten a cut-rate stripper and saved a LOT of money. And I think this huge budget and big studio treatment for essentially a trash film is why it got so many Razzies. If it was just some cut-rate trash film, no one would have noticed it and the film would have quickly disappeared.
The film suffers because it's a bizarro script that seldom makes sense, has characters who simply are caricatures instead of believable members of the human race and because the film cannot decide what it wants to be. Is it a comedy? Is it a raunchy film? Is it a drama about a mother trying to regain custody of her kid? Is it a murder mystery? Is it a film about politics and the abuse of power? Is it an episode of "The Jerry Springer Show"? Any one of these might have worked...but together the film is just brain-achingingly weird and nonsensical--especially by the very end. Not bad enough to have earned 6 Razzies...but pretty bad.