from the likes of The Independent, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker and E! News. The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino credited the movie's "transformation" from a flop to a "venerated artifact of Y2K camp" to its slow discovery on VHS and DVD by teenage girls who identified with its truthfulness and particular brand of dark humor. Tolentino summed up the movie as "...offensive, for sure—completely awful, really, and possibly deadly. It is also irreplaceable, hilarious, surprisingly tender, and lavishly, magnificently absurd." The Guardian praised the film's "vicious indecency", describing it as "...trashy, wonderful, endlessly quotable, and...20 years ahead of its time." Adam White further praised the movie's radical departure from lighthearted teen movies of the late 1990s, stating that it "was made for a generation of freaks and outsiders, whose ambitions, oddities, queerness and poverty were otherwise ignored by anything similarly mainstream or funny." He added that it was "acidic and truthful about beauty, class and ambition, satirised all-American moralism and blew up Denise Richards, then fresh from Wild Things, as she rode a giant paper-maché swan." Alex Zaragoza of Teen Vogue echoed other reviews in praising the movie's appeal to outsiders and misfits, and departing from the teen rom-com tropes of other movies released that year like 10 Things I Hate About You and She's All That. Zaragoza stated that the girls in Drop Dead Gorgeous "don't yearn to land their respective dream boy...they're too busy trying not to get clapped by a crazed mother-daughter duo... and striving to break out of the confines of their small town." He further described it as a "wild, absurdly portrayed story that's fundamentally about small-town struggles and overcoming the adversity of being born into a class that lacks opportunities to ultimately earn the life you've dreamed of for yourself. It's unabashed weirdness and mockumentary-style filmmaking made it an immediate cult classic..." Soundtrack References External links 1990s black comedy films 1990s mockumentary films 1990s satirical films 1990s teen comedy films 1999 comedy films 1999 films 1999 directorial debut films American black comedy films American mockumentary films American satirical films American teen comedy films Films about murder Films about beauty pageants Films scored by Mark Mothersbaugh Films set in 1995 Films set in Minnesota Films shot in Minnesota New Line Cinema films 1990s English-language films 1990s American films