In the notorious 1995 flop Showgirls, there was a background stripper named Penny Slot. Most people forgot about her the moment the credits rolled. Rena Riffel did not.

16 years later, the actress who played Penny made a sequel about her. She wrote it, directed it, produced it, edited it, largely paid for it, and gave herself the lead.

SHOWGIRLS 2: PENNY'S FROM HEAVEN (2011) runs 145 minutes, cost about $30,000, and follows Penny out of Vegas and toward stardom on a low-rent TV dance show.

It is, by most conventional measures, a disaster. One-star reviews, scenes visibly shot at highway rest stops, a plot that wanders for two and a half hours. Yet it has the sincere, irrepressible strangeness of a Tommy Wiseau film.

Riffel had worked with David Lynch on Mulholland Drive, and she thanks him in the credits. Some contemporary critics now argue, without irony, that this film is a genuinely Lynchian object, a micro-budget digital fever dream.

At least one film writer, Peter Cox of The Lost Highway Hotel, pleads for a boutique label restoration, calling Showgirls 2 "a strange kind of masterpiece."