2/5 Decent Price For Three Movies That Have Merits But Aren't Great
  by Gift Card Recipient (Santa Barbara, CA)
It's a decent price for three movies that really don't go together:

SHOWGIRLS actually manages to make female nudity unsexy - hard to imagine. Every budding film fan definitely has to see SHOWGIRLS - if nothing else, to analyze how not go about making a sexy movie. It fails on nearly every count there. Sure, the dialogue and characters are not very well developed but others films have skated by on less - somehow, they made nudity and sex clinical and harsh which of course was kind of the whole point of the film. It's not really Elizabeth Berkeley's fault that the film is so bad but what's appalling and/or hard to turn away is her earnestness - somehow she got the sense this was going to make her a HUGE star and she throws everything she can muster in the role but she was ill-informed at every turn and at every scene. It's like she thinks in a costume drama with Shakespearean dialogue when she's in a Vegas show that starts at 1AM (literally).

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR is also another bizarre film that is all the wrong mixture of "American" sexy - it looks down on porn while trying to be a porn movie ... and ends up mocking itself. Elisha Cuthbert is a gorgeous woman of course but clearly is out of her league trying to protray sexy. Clearly, she knows she's beautiful and has an effect on men but is incapable of protraying that on screen ... take a look at European actresses like Eva Green or Emmanuelle Beart - they can be vulnerable and sexy dressed in a knight's armor or fierce and fully armoured even if standing around naked. For a porn actress, she is totally scraed to even be nude - no idea why she took this role? But then the producer-director-writer had no clue either - they want to tell us to embrace porn/nudity/sex as natural part of social intercourse but then when it actually comes time to do that, they revert back to sneering and acting childish at nudity.

SEX & THE TEENAGE MIND has one thing going for it - Danica McKellar in her underwear for a few minutes, other than that - it looks like it was shot on video and then the film-look effect was added.