A Couple Of Big Films

Yesterday I watched "Stripped To Kill 2: Live Girls". Having already seen "Stripped To Kill", I think I can offer some comment on them both. As you might guess, both concern murder and intrigue at strip clubs. In the original, a female cop must go undercover as a stripper in order to solve a string of murders that is claiming the lives of dancers. I must confess that this displays more concern for the lives of strippers than I suspect the police force has.

This movie shows as much as its successor the curious pattern of dancers making themselves very unlikable right before they are murdered. I fully believe that animosity amongst dancers exists behind the scenes at strip clubs, but the timing in these films is exceptional. Also exception is one particular moment in the movie where the undercover cop has chosen to end her undercover assignment and pursue the case through conventional means. Telling the strip club manager this, she's then convinced to do one last shift. That's more dedication to her fake job than I thought she'd have.

Now, the sequel follows a very similar pattern, except that there is no undercover component. Instead we follow one stripper with a heart of gold, the cop investigating the murders, and the other dancers at the club. The sequel is a great place to observe the bizarrely avant garde routines the dancers perform. The disrobing comes very late in the dances, which are very moody and interpretive. The film's inclusion of dream sequences would be more impactful if the actual dances seemed less like dreams themselves.

Ultimately the sequel does a lot of what the original did well, but lacks something. Really they both are lacking in terms of story, and I will never apologize for expecting more in the way of story from the less respected genres and subgenres. No movie is exempt from basic rules of storytelling. They all benefit from doing it well- even the titillation delivery vehicles like this one- and it's not an expensive thing to do. Still, these two films both have their charms.