High camp meets body horror in the latest stinker from the creator of ‘All’s Fair’
It’s more the case that she’s sweating as profusely as Christy Moore in a sauna. She’s thirsty too.
So thirsty that she suddenly dives into the audience and grabs every bottle of water she can lay her hands on and guzzles it down. Gallons of the stuff.
Then she has a freakout and starts hurling terrified audience members against walls and through windows like they were ragdolls.
She then runs out into the street, battering anyone who gets in her way and kicks a guy off his motorcycle.
There’s a wild bike-versus-cop car chase before she slams into a motorist, spins into the air and hits the ground with a crunch.
She staggers to her feet, despite having two broken, grotesquely twisted legs and a gristle-covered shin bone poking through her skin.
A drugged-up supermodel goes on a violent rampage before catching fire and exploding in the demented opening minutes of ‘The Beauty’. Photo: Disney+
News in 90 seconds – Thursday 22nd of January
Then she starts smoking. Literally. Smoke wafts from her body as she catches fire. And then she explodes – boom, splat! – spraying the armed cops who’ve surrounded her with viscera.
Spectacular and spectacularly silly, all this is soundtracked, less than subtly, by The Prodigy’s Firestarter.
Welcome to the first demented few minutes of The Beauty (Disney+, episodes 1-3, Thursday, January 22), another overflowing crock of steaming dung from TV’s greatest spoofer, Ryan Murphy.
Evan Peters as Cooper Madsen and Rebecca Hall as Jordan Bennett in ‘The Beauty’. Photo: Philippe Antonello/FX
Is it as bad as Murphy’s previous atrocity, the disastrous legal drama All’s Fair, which received multiple zero-star ratings from critics and a 6pc Rotten Tomatoes rating, and proved that, as an actor, Kim Kardashian is the timber industry’s loss?
No, it isn’t quite that bad. But given that All’s Fair set the bar so low, it’s practically six feet underground, this is not saying a whole lot.
The Beauty was apparently greenlit two months after the release of Demi Moore’s black comedy horror The Substance. There are similarities; the defining difference, however, is that one is great and the other is muck.
Another way of looking at it is that it’s a schlocky, tonally uneven mess
Ryan has claimed the series is a commentary on “Ozempic culture” and the current obsession with drug-assisted, quick-fix physical transformation. Well, that’s one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is that it’s a schlocky, tonally uneven mess, a muddle of globetrotting thriller, body horror and the usual tiresome Murphy mix of high camp and low, cack-handed satire.
After the frantic opening, The Beauty slows to a crawl for a hotel bedroom scene between a pair of glib, annoying FBI agents/lovers called Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall), who trade what the script imagines to be witticisms for what feels like a week.
Madsen and Bennett, who speak multiple languages and appear to have an unlimited wardrobe budget (he also seems to be an expert on Egyptian hieroglyphics), are investigating the case of the exploding supermodel.
The Assassin swaggers around in a black crocodile leather coat and a metal eyepatch
It seems people have been sweating, catching fire and blowing up all over the place: Paris, Venice, New York. It’s all because of a mysterious drug (imaginatively called “The Beauty”) that grants, via an icky transformation, immediate physical attractiveness, but with some inconvenient side effects – such as, well, sweating, catching fire and blowing up.
The physical attractiveness and the side effects are spread by having sex. This is seriously bad news for the world when a chubby, bedroom-dwelling New Jersey incel gets the treatment and is transformed into an impossibly hunky, unstoppably priapic superspreader played by Jeremy Pope.
The evil genius behind the drug is a tech billionaire called Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher), who’s also known as “The Corporation”.
Forst employs an assassin, called “The Assassin”, played by Anthony Ramos. The Assassin swaggers around in a black crocodile leather coat and a metal eyepatch: no doubt the perfect disguise for melting into a crowd after a hit.
Oh, and The Assassin claims to be 65, even though he looks 30 years younger, presumably as a result of one of Forst’s wonder drugs.
Murphy throws everything he can think of at the wall in the hope something sticks, including poor Isabella Rossellini, who really deserves better than this mess of excess.
Rating: One star