10 Downright Ridiculous Excuses For Terrible Movies

6. Everyone Missed The Point - Showgirls

The Excuse: Paul Verhoeven apparently reckons that the film's box office failure was thanks to audiences feeling alienated by Showgirls' misanthropic attitude toward its characters, subject matter, and generally towards human existence.

Perhaps it was because of the aggressive marketing campaign that basically sold Showgirls as the closest thing to mainstream porn we'd ever get to see in cinemas, and the conscious attempt to build that sordid hype, but I never got any inkling that Showgirls was anything but a voyeuristic experience made to be provocative by showing off as much skin as possible. Yes it was bleak, and it definitely had a message in there about the squalor of certain human lives, and the grotesque way society feeds off certain people, but that is no excuse to make a bad movie. You can be clever and not sacrifice quality - even Lars Von Trier occasionally makes enjoyable movies, even when he's trying to make them as unwatchable as possible. Neither misanthropy nor exploitation nor satire can wholly justify how poor the script is, or the acting (chiefly from Berkley) or how tepid and grotesque the sex scenes are. That critical re-evaluation of the film is merely a response to Verhoeven himself, and an unwillingness to accept that he just made a poor film, because even with knowledge of the supposed politicised intent, Showgirls is still a remarkably difficult to watch, and not because it intends to be.