Drop Dead Gorgeous | The Haunting | Inspector Gadget

Smile meets The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheeleader-Murdering Mom. The only thing missing is Mike Ritchie, who directed these two films, and surely could have brought a darker edge to this project than Michael Patrick Jann, a former guiding light behind MTV's The State.

In the town of Mount Rose, Minnesota, something strange is happening to the contestants in the annual Sarah Rose Miss Teen Princess America pageant. A documentary film team becomes witness to fires, falling stage lights, a mysterious hunting accident, and an exploding swan, incidents seemingly directly related to the competition. Local rich bitch Becky Leeman (Denise Richards), popular socialite and vice president of the Lutheran Sisterhood Gun Club, is the odds-on favorite because she's the daughter of former winner Gladys Leeman (Kirstie Alley), who just happens to chair the pageant committee. Her chief rival is trailer park beauty Amber Adkins (Kirsten Dunst), a talented toe-tapper who works in the city morgue and the school's lunchroom to help her mom Annette (Ellen Barkin) make ends meet.

The press materials for the movie keep referring to former beauty queen Lona Williams' script as a "bravely drawn satire." Though she's served as writer and exec producer on The Drew Carey Show, she's not exactly a satirical genius. The movie's central conceit is a behind-the-scenes mockumentary of teenage beauty contests, and though several dark things happen (at least three deaths, one maiming, and another handicap), it's not as biting as, say, Cruel Intentions, nor nearly as push-the-envelope edgy as There's Something About Mary. That's not to say the script isn't fun, though. Most of the fun is found in rivalry, the exaggerated talent routines (dog calls, interpretive dance combined with sign language, and Denise Richards' disturbingly awful rendition of "I Love You, Baby," sung terribly off-key while dancing with a stuffed Christ on the cross), and Barkin as the deliciously floozy trailer park mama with a "beauty salon" in her kitchen and an insatiable desire for her daughter to compete.

The town's inhabitants are typical Hollyweird small-town eccentrics. The judges include a hardware store owner (Michael McShane) with a mentally-challenged brother (William Sasso) and a pharmacist who's overly defensive about his duties, and a woman who works in Rebecca's father's furniture store. All of the citizens, of course, sport broad upper Midwest Scandinavian accents, a new Hollywood cliché courtesy of Fargo. Rebecca's accent, however, has been stage-mothered out of her by Gladys.