Drop Dead Sexy

It seems like Drop Dead Sexy started out with an interesting idea for a dark comedy, but ran aground somewhere in the writing process. The plot holes, awkward characters, and rather thin resolution make me wonder if money ran out somewhere along the way and the script was hastily finished and/or doctored up to get the movie released quickly.

Jason Lee is surprisingly flat as the main character. I am guessing the problem is, again, more in the writing than the actor since Lee is doing a great job playing another hapless loser in My Name Is Earl. Crispin Glover was probably the only consistently funny character in the movie (and, I must admit, the reason I checked it out in the first place). His innate awkwardness lends a special humor to a role that could have otherwise been played as the naive idiot sidekick.

Drop Dead Sexy isn't without its funny moments, most coming from the interactions between Lee and Glover, but it does suffer from lowbrow humor (e.g. the running joke about a gay biker named Tiny) that actually feels like an afterthought. In better hands this could have been a great dark comedy and possibly a cult classic, but instead it will probably languish as a trashy comedy stuck next to Dorm Daze in the local Blockbuster.

Now, here's a little obscure and underrated flick. Drop Dead Sexy is a dark humor comedy starring Jason Lee and Crispin Glover (George McFly from Back To The Future) that never reaches its climax. It's like the whole movie is just one big foreplay without the actual pleasure of sex. Sure we can enjoy foreplay, and some hints of a felatio, but to go without any of those two things is a crime with a girl (story) like that. Again, it seems that macabre and black humor comedies always resort to dead people for a source of laughs, and as you probably guessed this is the case here. This isn't Bernie, but a hot chick so there's that love is in the air vibe to spice things up. Characters are relatively developed and very typical, adding more to the mediocrity of the movie. Still this should be enough to keep you entertained for an hour and a half.

Frank and Eddy are two dumba**es without money or any respect for the law. Frank being the smart one, accepts a job from a local mafia boss Spider to smuggle 250.000 $ worth of cigarettes, but after a little accident on the road the truck with them explodes. Two of them are now in quite a pickle, and again Frank thinks of a way to get some money: he decides that they go grave-robbing. Eddy being the grave digger, leads them in and after they dug up the grave with the necklace, they find out that there is no necklace and only a corpse of a beautiful young woman. As the night watchman spots them they rush out of the cemetery with the girl in the back of their truck. Stuck with a dead body and in debt with the local mobster the dynamic duo is in a seemingly desperate situation, but they will find a way out of it

The dumb loser Frank Muzzy (Jason Lee) invites his alcoholic friend and gravedigger Eddie (Crispin Glover) to raise some money bootlegging US$ 250,000.00 in cigarettes for the powerful mobster Spider (Pruitt Taylor Vince) to Mexico. However, their truck catches fire and they lose the load. Frank becomes desperate to raise the amount, and hides himself with Eddie in the house of his mother. When Frank sees in the newspaper the picture of Crystal Harkness (Melissa Keller), the wife of the tycoon Harkness (Xander Berkeley), Eddie confirms that she was a former strip dancer and buried with a valuable necklace. Frank forces Eddie to exhume her body, but they do not find the jewel. Frank brings Crystal's corpse to his hideout and decides to ask a ransom to Harkness getting into a deeper trouble, while Eddie falls in love for Crystal.

"Drop Dead Sexy" is a silly, but very funny black comedy. The situation with a dead body made me recall "Weekend at Bernie's", but the jokes with the sexy Melissa Keller are different, with eroticism and even necrophilia. Crispin Glover is responsible for the best and funniest moments in this entertaining movie. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Sexy de Morrer" ("Sexy to Die")

DROP DEAD SEXY 2005 (JASON LEE, CRISPIN GLOVER) DIRECTED BY: MICHAEL PHILIP ~ THE RUNDOWN: Did you see the title? The cover, perhaps? If so, you knew exactly what you were in for and got exactly what you expected: a lame comedy low on laughs and about as original as the name John. ~ I really shouldn't be reviewing this because there's nothing I can say that the DVD cover doesn't. But, what the hell, I'm a Crispin Glover fan and when I saw it sitting there on the shelf at Blockbuster I couldn't resist. Crispin, as usual, was fun to watch, and the rest of the cast was nicely assembled and actually gave the movie quite a bit of life even though Jason Lee is as annoying as an elderly driver. I guess the other good thing about it was that, at only seventy-nine minutes in length aside from the credits, it was nice and short. Still, it was essentially a complete waste of my time except of course I'm an avid Glover fan, which at least gives me some sort of excuse even though you probably don't have one. ~ Aside from extremely occasional chuckle-worthy moments, the movie's attempts at causing laughter are cheesy, predictable and absolutely futile, good enough only for stupid teenagers and/or people very high on something. The premise of the movie is ridiculous, cheap and slightly more generic than Dr. Thunder, and pans out like a deformed Cohen Bros movie. Those films are, of course, brilliantly written, while this was lazily written at best, chocked full of a complete lack of imagination.

After failing to get into several movies, we waited for an hour and a half to see this movie at it's premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, TX. The crowd at the premiere was probably biased, seeing as how the movie was filmed in Austin, but most of the crowd seemed to enjoy the film.

The film provides a different sense of humor, though somewhat dark. To avoid spoiling the plot, I'll tip-toe around the exact plot. The movie provided good laughs, if you are willing to get past the weirdness of the plot content. I did spend a good portion of the film almost afraid the content was going to cross the line. There were interesting twists, and never it lets you be certain where the plot line was headed. The plot left a few rough edges, unanswered questions, and characters that either appeared out of no-where, or disappeared just as fast.

I'm not a big fan of Jason Lee, but he seemed to play his character to the letter. Crispin Glover's character really threw me at first. I'd expect him to play this character given the content of the film, what I didn't expect was his accent. It's a tough fit for him, but he seems to do a pretty good job at pulling it off. I thought the supporting cast filled in very nicely alongside of the main actors and actresses.

The cinematography was pretty straight forward with the exception of flashback scenes, which I thought were nicely done. Aside a few technically cheesy shots, the filming was done alright.

All together, I give the movie decent marks for a somewhat original and twisted plot line, bringing a different sense of humor that's worth a few laughs. However since the movie's dark humor goes against my typical sensibilities, I drop my rating a mark or so.

Overall, I give it 6.4/10 to round to an even 6/10.