Megan (Lacey Hartselle) is a stripper who lives in an apartment with a bunch of other strippers who mostly just sit around and complain about their lives to one another. When they’re not doing that, the ladies think up new stripper names, have flashbacks to their crummy past, and try to figure out how they’re going to support their families. At the club, some money goes missing and soon, everyone is a suspect. We eventually learn Goldie (Gabriele Orebaugh) is the culprit and she brings down a world of shit on the other girls seeing as the money belonged to the Mob and all. She and Megan then make a run for it, but can they trust one another?
The constant breaking of the fourth wall sort of makes this feel like a stage play adaptation, and for all I know, it probably is. However, the strippers don’t have anything substantial to say to the camera as their monologues are amateurishly written and painfully performed. It certainly does little to endear them to the audience.
Speaking of underwhelming audience experiences, it's also frustrating that the stripping scenes feature no nudity. Heck, the strippers don’t even really dance. They just pout and slowly circle around the pole. Even worse is the fact that the stage is just a stripper pole in front of a tinsel curtain. What can you say about a movie about strippers that can’t even afford to film in a real strip club? I know they were going for a theatrical feel with all the monologues and shit, but that strip club set wouldn’t cut it in an Off-Off-Off Broadway play.
Even though the fourth-wall breaks are kind of annoying, that storytelling device is still somewhat novel in something like this. Once the plot focuses on the missing money and the girls going on the lam, it becomes rote and boringly predictable. All in all, The Lioness has very little bite.
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