Drop Dead Gorgeous

It's a monster movie, right?

I was supposed to watch Palestine 36 last night; I’d been really looking forward to it, but for some unfathomable reason I couldn’t log into my BFI account, and I ended up getting so annoyed I needed something to distract me. I vaguelly assumed that Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) was a comedy - it’s described as a satire - I wasn’t expecting a psychological horror. Imagine watching ‘Best of Show ’ and seeing at the end it was sponsored by a Chinese dog meat market.

Sorry Kirsten, there is no hope - enjoy it while you can.

Storywise, it’s a mockumentary following the experiences of a group of very small-town American girls as they prepare for a low-rent beauty contest that ‘might’ give them the chance to move up to a less low-rent contest and onwards and upwards to something better than they have today. It’s about ambition, desperation, fear of failure, actually living with failure, greed, delusion, prejudice, hatred, murder, more murder; it’s all in here. We laugh as contestants are picked off, mutilated, innocent people get shot in the face, set on fire, perform expressive dance routines, do their hair, find new uses for Vaseline, and live the American dream. And that’s the whole point - the American dream is cruel, ugly and ruthless - a bit like Kirsty Alley in a role she was clearly born to play.

Brittany Murphy, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Denise Richards are all excellent.

This film is 30 years old, but it’s become so much more of a mirror to its society than it could ever have imagined. I’ve always struggled with ‘mockumentaries’ because they literally exist to ‘mock’. It’s a fine line between finding humour and relishing humiliation. There is nothing wrong with living in a small town and wanting to escape. My own cousin was a teen beauty queen who hit the heights (after winning a number of local pageants, she became Miss Wales, the first ever Welsh speaker to win), and later a finalist in Miss Universe) So I get it, and the girls in this film NEED to win, either for themselves or as a proxy for their parents (and community) - it’s how far they might be prepared to go that scares me.

The smartest part of the film is the ‘almost’ happy ending - the potential snatched away at the last minute and how the girls react - who really wins? Does anyone? The men are all monsters, but the women don’t escape criticism either; everyone is somehow a predator.

Allison Janey and Ellen Barkin being the classiest women in the movie.

The cast are excellent - the impossibly beautiful Denise Richards puts in an early career best (I’m now starting to see her as a talented actress held back by her looks), Amy Adams is unrecognisably young and fresh - she’s genuinely charismatic and sparkling here. Ellen Barkin and Allison Janey give us heart and soul - Kirsten Dunst is fantastic, but there is the sadness that comes with me spending most of the film musing that the world is a colder, darker, poorer place without Brittany Murphy. She is missed.

I miss Brittany Murphy.