Drop Dead Gorgeous at 20: how dark pageant comedy works better in 2019

The pitch-black small-town mockumentary was a flop on release and left critics cold but 20 years later its vicious indecency remains daringDrop Dead Gorgeous is one of my favourite films.

It also made less than its $15m budget at the box office and only has a 45% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Jesus loves winners, as Gladys Leeman tells her daughter Becky, but I do understand why Drop Dead Gorgeous was not triumphant when it was released 20 years ago.

Shot as a mockumentary, and indebted to John Waters and Christopher Guest, it follows a group of young, wannabe high school beauty queens as they compete in the Sarah Rose Cosmetics Mount Rose American Teen Princess pageant.

Its humour is crude, its message is anarchic, its bite is vicious and its jokes don’t so much stretch the boundaries of taste as tap-dance all over them in a mortuary.Related: American Pie at

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