Drop Dead Gorgeous is a mockumentary (my most-loathed genre) that fails to evoke a sense of documentary, and a comedy that's hurtin' for laughs. It's the kind of movie that considers a montage of dim-witted answers to the hoary question "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" to be comic platinum. A send-up of pageantry has promise, but Drop Dead Gorgeous winds up as next of kin to Robert Altman's laboured, pointless Ready to Wear.

The setting is the fictitious town of Mount Rose, Minnesota, where beautiful teenage girls compete annually for a qualifying entrance into The Sarah Rose Princess America Pageant. A camera crew is following the organizers of this year's event, as well as the judges, the contestants, and key townsfolk.

Former beauty queen Gladys Leeman (Kirstie Alley) runs the event and is campaigning for her daughter, Rebecca (Denise Richards), to win the crown. Rebecca's fiercest competition is Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst), a hard-working cutie with a lock on the sympathy vote because of her dirt-poor roots; Amber thus becomes the target of Rebecca's numerous assasination attempts. As if Rebecca would lose one of these pageants--that serial killing subplot might have played funnier if the filmmakers had cast someone butt-ugly as the younger Leeman instead of Silicone Sweetheart Denise Richards.

We live in a post-There's Something About Mary world, which means every damn yuk movie must now contain two or three choice moments of tastelessness, organic to the story or not. In Drop Dead Gorgeous, the gross-outs include scenes of models puking, as well as a protracted gag about Amber's deformed mother (Ellen Barkin), a woman with a beer can permanently welded to her drinking hand.

In fact, a slavish trendiness is one of the film's two big problems: much of the screenplay relies on so-called sick laughs and the sing-songy Minnesotan accents of its characters for guffaws. Listening to actors whose research of a unique dialect obviously extended no further than popping Fargo into the VCR is excruciating. (Richards doesn't even attempt the voice; manufacturer Mattel had no comment.) A hip humour that Drop Dead Gorgeous also specializes in is religion baiting--aimed at Lutheranism, specifically. (See Orgazmo, "South Park", etc.) Rebecca is a proud member of the Lutheran Sisters Gun Club, and her 'talent' is dancing with a crucified Jesus on wheels. Where's William Donohue when you need him?

The film's other big failing is, as I said above, that it doesn't resemble a documentary, despite the odd handheld interview and boom mikes that drift in and out of shots. (The illusion is really destroyed by the occasional multi-camera set-up; when Amber performs a tap-dance, it's photographed from every conceivable angle.) That's because it has loosely hung-together bits instead of sidebars--in a real documentary, tangential moments serve to add depth to the main subject, while in Drop Dead Gorgeous, they're there to distract us from the dog-and-pony show that should be the heart of the story. Lona Williams displays insecurity as a screenwriter--she has filtered her real-life runway experiences through a disappointing sitcom sensibility. Drop Dead Gorgeous is stale and woefully inobservant.

Presented in 1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced matted widescreen or fullscreen (which contains oodles more picture information on the top and bottom of the screen), the to-die-for image on New Line's Drop Dead Gorgeous DVD is free of both filmic and digital artifacts. Colours are lush and contrast is spot-on. The 5.1 Dolby Digital soundmix isn't very exciting, though many of the songs do have a tremendous surround presence. Actually, I preferred the audio on the cleverly designed main menu, which is bombastically amusing. Cast and crew bios and a trailer (in 5.1) finish off the package. DVD-ROM users can also access Williams' chickenshit full-length screenplay.-Bill Chambers