Drop Dead Gorgeous is the kind of film that you need to see with a companion. You need to have someone sitting next to you with whom you can swap disbelieving glances coupled with guilty chuckles. For the pleasures in this film are all gained at the expense of the many ridiculous characters.

The plot centers around a beauty pageant in a small town in Minnesota–yep be prepared for more of those backwoodsy accents most of which are far less successful than in Fargo. The organizing committee for the pageant is masterminded by Gladys Leeman, played by Kirstie Alley. Gladys is wife to the local furniture merchant and mother to Becky, the would-be winner of the pageant. And Gladys is prepared to do whatever it takes to gain the crown for her daughter.

Becky's greatest rival is Amber, a girl from the other side of the tracks. Amber and her mother live in the trailer park, with every stereotypical idiosyncracy you can imagine. For example, when the mother, played with glee by Ellen Barkin, is injured in an explosion at the trailor park, her hand is melted into a beer can. During the pageant, she uses the bandaged beer-can hand as an ashtray. Most of the follows this pattern. It's Saturday Night Live humor that begins in a recognizable reality, which is then blown completely out of all proportion.

I enjoyed Drop Dead Gorgeous for that very reason. Beauty pageants are so deliciously mockable it's like shooting fish in a bucket. Hence nothing is sacred in this movie, it's tasteless and nasty and probably written with more than a little bitterness!!!

But there's strength in the performances. Kirstie Alley is just right as the pushy mother we all know and love and Denise Richards is perfect as the daughter who is so plastic you keep looking for the tupperware logo on her forehead.

I found the movie to be nothing more than the advertisements suggest–an amusing collection of gags born from nastiness and taken to the nth degree.