When I first saw trailers for this movie, I was completely turned off. It looked sooooo stupid, and since I have a thing for bad movies, lately, I figured I may as well review it:
It's not nearly as bad as I suspected. The basic story is this: Amber (Kirsten Dunst, Claudia from Interview with the Vampire) is a 17 year old girl who works in a mortuary. She decides to take part in the local beauty pageant, which is run by Rebecca Howe (Kirstie Alley), whose daughter, Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) is also competing. Someone is trying to kill off the contestants (except for Christmas Jones), and no one knows who. The police attribute all the murders and attempts to mere accidents. Meanwhile, there's a camera crew trying to make a documentary of the whol pageant (which turns out to be the movie. It's quite clever, really.) Anyway, Amber's mom is injured when her house (trailer) explodes, and her beer can is fused to her hand, and Amber can't deal with the stress, so she decides to quite, but she changes her mind after talking to her mother. The day of the pageant comes, and someone stole Amber's talent costume. According to the rules, all costumes have to be approved a week in advance, so she's pretty much out of the competition until her very nice friend (the girl from Clueless, I think) quits and gives Amber her costume. Amber does her tap routine, and Christmas Jones does her routine(in which she sings horribly about Jesus while at the same time dancing around stage with a stuffed Christ.) The moment of truth arrives, and Rebecca Howe reads the results from the judges (One of whom, John Dough, is a pedophile), and of course, Christmas Jones wins. Now, since this is supposed to be a happy movie, Amber has to come out on top. So, there's a big parade, and the winner of the pageant has to ride on top of this giant swan. Well, the swan explodes, killing Christmas, and Amber gets the crown by default. This is where the movie should end.
Amber then goes to state, where she wins (very quickly) because all the other contestants ate the shellfish, and they all got sick. So, Amber goes to the nationals, which gets cancelled because the main sponser was indicted by the IRS.
Then the movie ends. Finally.
All in all, this movie was pretty cute, but it didn't know where to end. If you're in the mood for a shallow dark comedy, I recommend this. It's filmed well, the acting is pretty damn good, and the story's pretty original. The only disappointment I had was that the movie didn't suck, so I didn't have much to make fun of.