Worst of the Worst: #67, The Hottie And The Nottie

There are not many fundamentally worse movies than the ones that deal with a man who falls in love with a seemingly unattractive woman because he sees her inner beauty. The man never actually falls in love with the woman until she's had some sort of makeover, making her actually beautiful. Stupid and insulting.

But there's a lot more stupid and insulting about The Hottie and the Nottie than just the plot, though it is probably the worst of the "inner beauty" movies. For one thing, the unattractiveness of the woman is quite extreme. She has moles, a unibrow, mangled teeth, an infected toenail, and boogers dangling out of her nose. Everyone think she's hideous and she's never kissed anyone. But the main character falls in love with her! After she has major skin treatments, her teeth are fixed, her mole is removed, and her hair grows in with Rogaine.

The movie is probably most famous for starring Paris Hilton, but even she isn't the most stupid and insulting thing about it. Yes, she is an awful actress. All of her lines are delivered with a smiling apathy and the movie is more concerned with showing her running in a bathing suit in slow motion, but she's not the worst part of the movie. That's how bad it is. The worst part is the constant ineptitude displayed by almost all involved. The script looks to have been strung together by fifty people who each wrote a few sentences at the beginning of a Nyquil sleep. The direction was quite possibly undertaken by a chimpanzee. It's not all bad, though; there are constant sound effects to highlight the "jokes"!

The two romantic leads, Christine Lakin and Joel Moore, are likable enough and that's what keeps this movie from challenging Battlefield Earth for worst ever. Once the bad makeup is off, Lakin is as cute and smart as you'd want from a romantic comedy. Moore does yeoman's work all along with the Nyquil-inspired arrangement of letters that he was given to read. Because the two are okay, the end of the movie ends up being pretty boring, which is an improvement. Boring isn't bad enough. It needs to be actively bad to get into that "worst ever" conversation.

On a side note, Moore is one lucky guy. He stars in this movie, which by all rights should have destroyed his movie career. It's estimated that each showing of The Hottie and the Nottie in theaters averaged five viewers. One year later, Avatar comes out, with him as Sam Worthington's sidekick. His bad movie doesn't get seen by too many people and his good movie gets seen by everyone. Jackpot, bullet dodged.