Review of Beastly (2011) by Tom R — 29 Dec 2011

(1 Star) Beastly is HYSTERICAL! It's a bad bad bad bad bad bad bad movie but it's so worth watching because it's a superb unintentional comedy. Just watch the first ten minutes and if you're not laughing, then shut it off, but if you're like me and enjoy astoundingly awful cinema, here it is at its finest. It's pretty much Twilight meets Beauty and the Beast and has the plot of a Rob Schneider movie that they tried making for real. The main character Kyle Kingson (Alex Pettyfer) is so unlikable that he's a cartoon character. His dialogue is so insane, you would think they took the script of a comedy and converted it into a teen romance, but forgot to change all his funny lines. He treats his maid the way Nicolas Cage treats his secretary in Vampire's Kiss (which if you don't know, is hilariously cruel). THEN you find out his dad is a big dickhead and he gets some outlandish dialogue too. Also, the spoiled rich white bastard has the perfect foil: a goth chick played by Mary-Kate Olsen, who curses him to be fugly (and this kind of reminds me of Rob Schneider's The Hot Chick). And once you think the plot craziness is dying down, SOMEONE GETS SHOT!! This movie is so bizarre and I'm only scratching the surface of everything that's wrong with it. And if you're a fan of Neil Patrick Harris, you'll like him here too because he seems to be the only one in on the joke that this movie is awful.

I know there are all the elements for a dark comedy here, but I like Beastly as it is: a hilarious trainwreck of a romantic teen film. Like this year's Abduction, it's amazingly bad and if you're entertained by bad movies, this is one of the finest of the romance genre.