Free Republic

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Showgirls, Vanessa Berkley’s big-screen debut that has gone from unmitigated disaster to cult camp classic. Paul Verhoeven’s risqué provocation starred Berkley as Nomi Malone, a Vegas transplant with nothing in her pocket but dreams of dancing and a wild drive to achieve them. The NC-17 film was roundly panned upon release, mocked across late night and in the press, and bombed hard at the box office. Berkley, who had emerged years earlier as a teen TV star on Saved by the Bell, faced critics’ unrelenting wrath and was promptly dropped by her team...

Update: The January 6 Committee approved criminal referrals against Trump. It will ultimately be up to US Attorney General Merrick Garland whether or not to charge Trump. NBC News reported: The House Jan. 6 committee voted Monday to recommend the Justice Department pursue a batch of criminal charges against former President Donald Trump for his role in an effort to overturn the 2020 election and the fomenting of a deadly mob at the Capitol. The select committee also took aim at Trump’s top allies — on and off Capitol Hill — who worked with the 45th president to block certification...

“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough,” explained John Huston’s withered magnate Noah Cross in Chinatown. Alas, the same cannot be said of showgirls. Or rather, it can’t be said of Showgirls, director Paul Verhoeven’s infamously atrocious 1995 exploration of the Las Vegas stripping scene. This is despite the best efforts of You Don’t Nomi, a new 25th anniversary documentary by Jeffrey McHale that attempts to rehabilitate Verhoeven’s widely (and properly) reviled debacle, now considered by some to be cult film. Featuring voiceover by nearly a dozen critics and performers, several of whom have...

A showgirl who claims that she and other women were paid to attend Silvio Berlusconi’s private parties said yesterday that she had pictures showing her with the Italian Prime Minister in his bedroom. Patrizia D’Addario, a former model and escort girl, said that she had given prosecutors audio tapes but also had secretly recorded video footage of her encounters in the Prime Minister’s Rome residence. Ms D’Addario, 42, who was yesterday described by a senior government figure as a high-class prostitute, said that the footage showed her standing in front of a mirror. A bedroom with a framed photograph of...

A new state law banning seminude lap dances at Missouri strip clubs was declared unconstitutional by a judge Friday, two days before it was to go into effect. Cole County Circuit Judge Richard Callahan said provisions of the law violate First Amendment protections and state constitutional limits on amending a bill beyond its original purpose. "The state may not limit persons of majority age from engaging in lawful expressive conduct protected by the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution without a substantial and direct connection to adverse secondary effects, a showing that has not been made," Callahan said in...

The city of Las Vegas has concluded that a local company’s claims that it was charging men up to $10,000 to “hunt” naked women with paintball guns was a hoax, it was reported Friday. “IT WOULD APPEAR from all sorts of admissions ... that the purported Hunt for Bambi was a scam, that it was all staged, that there were actors and actresses and there wasn’t even the real shooting of paintballs,” Mayor Oscar Goodman told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Thursday. City officials told the newspaper that the mastermind of the scam, Michael Burdick, acknowledged that some hunts were...