Drop Dead Gorgeous

A faux documentary film featuring a glimpse behind the scenes of a small Minnesota town’s teen beauty contestants and their overly competitive families.

Some people may find stupid, over-the-top, stereotyped characters from a small town to be extremely funny, and I myself have been known to subscribe to this group from time to time, but it was obvious from the first frame of this film that its only source of comedy would come from its idiotic characters, goofy accents and ignorant statements. For me, that just wasn’t funny! It’s unfortunate because the premise of the film seemed ripe for parody with some funny characters brewing within, but for me, only a few chuckles trickled out here and there, but mostly I was shaking my head and thinking “this is just stupid”. It didn’t help that most of the main characters seemed to go in and our their accents from time to time.

Besides its lack of consistent humor, I also found that the film ran a little too long, had one really exaggerated and unfunny retarded character who was just embarrassing, and many, many missed opportunities, including a flat ending. I did enjoy two smaller characters in the film, one being the father of Denise Richards character and judge#2 with his penchant for “young girls”, but overall, most felt tired. Two characters which were way underused were Ellen Barkin, who could’ve been so much more, and Denise Richards, who appeared to be the star of the film from the look of its trailer, but actually only played a small part within a diverse cast of characters.

Overall, the film didn’t do it for me, offering very little in real humor and relying more on the easy, let’s make fun of the trailer-trash-folk-type of comedy. And if you’re expecting T&A from Richards, forget about it. Any which way you look at it, missed opportunities all around.

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian