Drop Dead Gorgeous

2010

Confusingly familiar title.

This is probably not the movie you are thinking of. According to IMDb, this is the 8th film or TV show named Drop Dead Gorgeous in the past 11 years. At least one of them was fairly significant, a 1999 comedy with a cast of familiar female faces: Kiki Dunst, Denise Richards, Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Allison Janney, Brittany Murphy, Amy Adams, Amanda Detmer, etc.

This particular straight-to-vid film, the latest effort with that familiar title, is a modest black comedy filled with faces which are much less recognizable - either completely unfamiliar or kinda-sorta vaguely familiar. In the category of "Damn, who is that guy? I know him from somewhere," Drop Dead Gorgeous turns out to be the answer to the question that has been troubling mankind since time immemorial: "Whatever happened to TS Quint?" The biggest name in the cast is the troubled actor Jeremy London, who once seemed to have a promising career as a likeable comedy everyman when he starred in Kevin Smith's Mallrats some 15 years ago, but who now seems to make the news only for episodes in his personal life, like having his house foreclosed, volunteering for a stint on Celebrity Rehab, or claiming to have been kidnapped earlier this year.

The film starts out with a young model having received her first big break as the fresh new face of a big fashion house. When she dies during a photo shoot, the creative people see no reason to abandon their campaign. They just keep dressing their model's corpse in designer clothing and snapping away. They soon come to realize that she has just the look they've been seeking! They also appreciate the fact that she causes far fewer problems than a live model. She never refuses to do nudity, she never needs a break, and she never exhibits any diva traits. The basic premise is that the fashion industry loves the "anorexic, heroin chic" look so much that the recently deceased make the perfect models. Of course, corpses do have their own set of unique problems, like the foul stench and the bloating, but that's nothing they can't deal with. How, exactly? Well, I guess you'll get the picture when I tell you that one of the characters is named, "Felix, the celebrity taxidermist."

The film gets by on a miniscule budget by structuring the narrative as a mockumentary in which a pseudo-documentarian is to follow around the promising young model through all the stages of her first big break. Since that concept require that the film must like a low-budget documentary, it is shot on inexpensive video tape, and requires no sets other than a studio, a hotel room, and an agent's office.

Is it any good? Well, as I write this it is currently rated 1.1 at IMDb

And that might be a little high.

The low budget isn't what kills it. Given the same general premise, it might be possible to create a pretty good movie despite a lack of money and an amateurish feel. This, however, isn't it. The script is the real culprit. It's just not very funny, mostly because everything is too obvious and the characters are too broad, but also because the dialogue just isn't brilliant enough or crazy enough to pull off anything this dark.

Let's face it, the only thing more difficult to watch than a humorless comedy is a humorless black comedy. The former is merely an exercise in tedium, while the latter is not only boring and unfunny, but can seem to be in bad taste as well. That's basically what happens here.

Nudity:

There is some nudity from Ivy Levan.