Buku years ago there was a sendup of beauty pageants called Smile. I saw it, but the flick was so long ago that it's now nothing more than a few disconnected scenes.

Now there's Drop Dead Gorgeous, the psuedo documentary look at the same schtick. A crew follows the two main contenders for the crown as they prepare for the pageant in a small Minnesota town. Numma One is Denise Richards, the stunningly beautiful woman who appeared in Starship Troopers . Here she plays a high school student and boy, talk about pushing the ol' suspension of disbelief to the snapping point. Kirstie Alley is her mother and they practically qualify as siblings because of their lack of age difference. Numma Two and trying harder is Kirsten Dunst as the nice girl from the wrong side of the tracks. She lives in a trailer park with Ellen Barkin as her slatternly mother whose nutritional requirements are met by beer and cigarettes.

Drop Dead has a lot of zinger satirical touches. There's the bulimia wing to the hospital where last year's pageant winner is a resident. Product tie-ins to the pageant get their comeuppance also.

The whole Minnesotan accent gets done to death a la Fargo with everyone adding "you betcha" to their dialogue. And I find it hard to believe that everyone in that state puffs on cigarettes like mobile chimneys either.

Small gripes overall. The movie has buku snappy one-liners to keep you laughing till the end. And while the ending does tie things up a little too neatly in another near suspension of disbelief snapper, it would be tough to come up with anything else to wrap it up. Not a great movie, but pretty good nonetheless. A Smile for the 90s.

Movie's suitability for:

• Action Jackson: 20%
• Joe Fratboy (date movie): 80%
• Cinephile (pretentious movie lover): 50%
• all around movie-goer: 70%