The same tawdry, NC-17 rated vision that rendered Showgirls a pop-cultural punch line in 1995, when dogpiling critics tried to convince readers (and themselves) that it was the “worst movie ever made,” now makes it look daring, subversive, and satirical. In 2012, the critics at Slant Magazine selected Showgirls as the 14th best film of the 1990s, a few spots ahead of Heat and one notch below Pulp Fiction. “Now that Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has been embraced by every hipster-than-thou cinephile in an orgy of self-congratulatory bad-movie worship,” wrote Eric Henderson, “a legitimately disreputable masterpiece like Showgirls still needs all the help it can get.”
Oscar-ratified talents like the Coen brothers, whose wonderful The Big Lebowski has transcended its mild reception to become a cultural touchstone, yielding ironic best-selling books like I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski, which at once parodies and peddles the idea of White Russians for the Soul. These and other more mainstream cult movies are worthy of appreciation and analysis, but the thrill of stumbling upon—or being guided toward—something truly unusual remains unmatched, especially in a moment when the internet has made everything (and every film) that much less obscure.
It turns out that the writer unfortunately buried the lede - the entire article could've been summed up with this sentence:
Ultimately, conversion is the ecstatic essence of cult cinema: the
feeling of trying to share something rare and precious with somebody
else; the excitement of having it offered to you.
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