Drop Dead Gorgeous

Bomb Rating: 

Heading up the beauty pageant organizing committee is Rebecca's overbearing mother, Gladys(Kirstie "Next stop: Hollywood Squares" Alley), who looks like she recently gave birth to a herd of cattle.

I really hated this movie, but unfortunately, I didn't write the review prior to seeing "Inspector Gadget," and now it's like the part of my brain that retains films has packed up and moved to Toledo.

I do remember that Denise Richards looks like somebody dipped her head in wax. She plays Minnesota high-schooler Rebecca Leeman, who's locked in a battle for beauty pageant queen with Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst). You know, I think when you're 27 and you're still capable of playing 18, it's time to start eating three square meals a day and making an effort to keep them down.

Heading up the beauty pageant organizing committee is Rebecca's overbearing mother, Gladys (Kirstie "Next stop: Hollywood Squares" Alley), who looks like she recently gave birth to a herd of cattle. Naturally, the whole thing is fixed. Although lots of really unpleasant things happen to just about everybody, director Michael Patrick Jann makes the fateful decision to present this film as some sort of documentary, as though seeing Kirstie Alley wouldn't tip everybody off to the "fiction" thing.

It's that documentary premise that makes "Drop Dead Gorgeous" utterly intolerable. Everybody in the film is so stupid or so despicable that one wishes the gnats and mosquitoes would finally overrun Minnesota and eat everybody alive. Instead of just making a dark comedy, the filmmakers add an additional level of contempt by revealing themselves to be conceptual idiots. You know what it's like when one stupid person tries to insult another stupid person? That mixture of embarrassment, loathing and pity is exactly what it feels like to watch "Drop Dead Gorgeous."