Not originally. When Akkad and Yablans approached Carpenter and Hill about making the first film, everyone involved assumed it would be a one-off. Its unprecedented success (for an independent film) led to the sequel, but Carpenter and Hill were reluctant to revisit Myers and Laurie, and they wanted to kill Myers off…

And those masks and the poster art were genuinely creepy when I was a kid.

Yeah the smile is lifted directly from the cover art to Rio, the mixed drink is the same one that is tipping over on the boat in the video for "Rio," the tiger is from the video for "Hungry Like the Wolf," etc. Duran Duran fandom clip art pretty much nails it.

Same here. "Rio" and "Hungry Like the Wolf" still make the best-of-the-80s playlists in my book, and their live cover of Cockney Rebels's "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)" for the Threesome soundtrack is fantastic.

How so? By all accounts their split was amicable

The Betty and Barney Hill case was pretty compelling to me when I was a kid, as was the general ubiquity of the gray aliens in accounts of abductions. Later seeing the similarity between the grays and an alien that had appeared on an episode of The Outer Limits that aired not long before the Hills had their alleged…

The local paper I grew up with did that with Doonsberry and Bloom County, then later The Boondocks.

You're right: MGM/UA distributed a 9-minute clip tape, essentially, to video stores and the National Association of Theater Owners to sell Showgirls as legitimate—versus pornographic—and the filmmakers actually presented it as a film about female empowerment.

I think maybe we're talking at cross purposes. I'd agree that if Showgirls had been successful it would have helped ease the stigma associated with the NC-17 rating. In fact, since we're commenting on a feature making book recommendations I'll offer one of my own: Kevin Sandler's The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Doesn't…

My avatar is actually a gay philosopher that's been dead for over thirty years and yours is more of an ass man, I think, but we can talk about tits.

As I said, to me they're pretty similar, and I think they both have virtues and drawbacks. I also think that if I'm giving Harmony Korine the benefit of the doubt, I don't see the harm in extending the same consideration to Eszterhas and Verhoeven. That's just me.

I wasn't making a case for Showgirls so much as positing that it's interesting that—to my mind—an equally problematic film like Spring Breakers was widely celebrated. It happens a lot with cinema.

I should probably preface this by once again pointing out that I'm not championing Showgirls.

I think there's something to that. I think there's also usually a narrative that emerges around a given piece of pop culture that's really hard to shake, for good or bad.

I'm ambivalent about both it and Spring Breakers. I just think there's not much difference between the two of them.

Showgirls is a good example, I think, of the weird line cinema often walks between art and trash. There's not much that separates its virtues and shortcomings from something like Spring Breakers, but one was almost universally panned and the other was widely celebrated as winking satire.

It's largely cyclical. Go back to the 1940s and 50s and you'll find that the genre had largely become the stuff of self-parody, with the Gothic monsters of the 1930s Universal films having been defanged by the real life horrors of World War II. By then Frankenstein and the Wolf Man were more likely to meet Abbot and…

I take your point about only a few key films being salient, but U.S. horror film production actually spiked quite a bit in the early 1970s after a lull in the 1950s and 60s, then hit another lull before spiking again throughout the 1980s, and a not insignificant number of films in the genre after, say, 1974 would…

What's even stranger to me is that she's obviously incredibly talented.

And maybe work with the filmmakers to include at least some scene addressing the group's problematic history with women in Straight Outta Compton, if not the specific scene of Dre assaulting Barnes that was excised. There's a lot more there that could have been addressed if they really wanted to try and atone: