In the dingy back alley of ’90s straight-to-video cinema—where the liquor’s watered down, the neon flickers like it’s got the shakes, and every script is written in lipstick on a motel mirror—you’ll find Lap Dancing (1995) sprawled out like a broken promise in six-inch heels. This isn’t a film so much as it is a stained cocktail napkin of an idea, passed off as drama and soaked in the cheap perfume of softcore ambition.
It sells itself like it’s got something to say about shattered dreams and the blood-price of ambition, but really it just unzips its fly, flashes a few skin-deep ideas, and slinks back into the shadows muttering something about empowerment. It wants to be Showgirls but ends up feeling like a rerun of Red Shoe Diaries shot on a camcorder by a guy who thinks character development means a tear during a strip tease.
Lap Dancing doesn’t dance. It staggers. And yet—like finding a rose in a gutter—there’s Lorissa McComas, the only damn reason to watch this smoke-and-mirrors mess all the way through.
Directed by Mike Sedan and penned by K.C. Martin (likely under a pseudonym to avoid long-term career damage), the plot follows Angie Parker, a wide-eyed small-town girl who heads to Hollywood to become an actress, only to find herself working at a strip club when opportunity doesn’t knock—though the camera certainly does. Often. In slow motion. And with soft jazz.
The acting—if we’re being charitable—is cardboard on a humid day. Tane McClure and Burke Morgan chew the scenery like they’re competing in a ham-eating contest, all overblown gestures and melodramatic stares that suggest they thought they were filming a softcore King Lear. The supporting cast feels like they were pulled from a 3 a.m. casting call for erotic thriller extras who can sort of emote—or at least look good in soft focus while pretending to contemplate life’s choices between lap dances.
The script is a parade of empty platitudes and breathy exposition, with every scene seemingly written as an excuse to get someone naked in a dimly lit room. Dialogue is delivered like everyone’s reading their lines off cocktail napkins just out of frame. Plot development is purely mechanical: aspiring actress becomes stripper, experiences moral friction, then gets a dramatic monologue while half-undressed in a neon-lit dressing room. There’s a whisper of a story about dreams, identity, and compromise, but it’s buried beneath fog machines and slow-motion body rolls.
Make no mistake: Lap Dancing is a terrible film. A skin-flick masquerading as character study, softcore dressed up in dramatic drag, a cinematic cigarette burn on the reel of 1990s straight-to-video trash. The plot creaks under its own weight, the dialogue’s flatter than week-old beer, and the direction has all the subtlety of a strip mall thunderstorm.
And yet… there’s Lorissa McComas.
She arrives on screen like a lost page from a better script. In a world of polyester thongs, neon glares, and dialogue that sounds like it was translated from another language by a drunk screenwriter, McComas brings something approximating soul. As Angie, the wide-eyed actress turned reluctant exotic dancer, she moves through the muck with a haunted dignity—like a fallen angel who never really had a choice.
There’s a beat poet’s ache to the way she plays Angie. You can see it in her eyes, the way they flicker when a man asks her to smile, the way she drapes herself in lingerie like it’s a burial shroud. She’s not just playing the role of a girl seduced and spat out by Hollywood—she is living the rot, absorbing it through the skin, like whores who dream of clean sheets but know they’ll wake up on a mattress that stinks of drugs and men’s lies.
McComas doesn’t act. She confesses. With every scene, she peels back a layer of herself—not just clothes, but emotion. She gives Angie a broken-wing quality that somehow survives the film’s best efforts to turn her into just another body on a stage. Watch her in the backstage moments—lip trembling, eyes darting, voice barely holding together under the weight of cheap perfume and cheaper promises. That’s where the tragedy lives. In those quiet, miserable in-betweens. In that smile she forces when the camera pans too close.
She says lines that sound like they were scribbled on the inside of a matchbook in Van Nuys, and she means them.She delivers hollow, hackneyed monologues about dreams and independence like they still matter. And maybe, in her hands, for a few fleeting seconds, they do. That’s the real magic trick.
Because the rest of Lap Dancing is all plastic heat and VHS fuzz. It’s the kind of film that mistakes prolonged striptease montages for emotional depth. Every character outside of Angie is a caricature with a hard-on, or a jaded cliché in a suit. The men leer. The women writhe. And the camera stays just long enough on a pair of breasts to fulfill the marketing promise, then cuts away before anything human can get in.
But McComas? She’s in another movie. One that never got made. A story about a girl who wanted more than stage lights and wrinkled dollar bills, who fell into the pit not because she was weak, but because the ladder was rigged and the rungs were greased with sweat and regret.
She makes Lap Dancing watchable. Hell, she makes it unforgettable in a weird, late-night-TV-on-cable-in-1997 kind of way. Her performance is a whisper of what might’ve been—a glimpse of talent caught in the wrong film, the wrong time, the wrong everything.
So if you watch Lap Dancing, don’t do it for the story. Don’t do it for the softcore titillation. Do it for Lorissa McComas. Do it because sometimes beauty grows in the ugliest gardens, and sometimes the saddest roles are the ones that show us what real charisma looks like when it’s forced to dance for rent money under pink lights.
She didn’t deserve this film. But maybe the film, in its own sleazy, misguided way, didn’t deserve her either.
