It's exactly what you thought it would be: A plagiarized, campus-set "Single White Female" pitched to teens.

Made with the slick, shorthand complacency of a TV movie, Beautiful is so overstuffed with contrivance, you can hardly breathe.

Black cats, ill-timed power outages and children in peril are just a few of the hoary scare tactics ineffectively rendered in the style of so many films buried in the dark recesses of January.

In the end it's only "The Chanukah Song, Part 3," playing over the closing credits, that manages to capture the joy of the season.

The most exhilarating fight by far is an acrobatic wall climber between Ja Rule and Nia Peeples, choreographed by Hong Kong's Xin Xin Xong (The Musketeer) who, in terms of thrills per minute, is the movie's real star.

There's more than a hint of self-pitying male-castration fantasy in writer-director Jeff Franklin's portrayal.

The script has all the spunk of Ikea-bookcase assembly instructions.

Oxymoronic musings of a vain country singer.

Let horses be horses, scrap the tin-eared Lukas Haas narration.

The story sinks, along with any deeper laughs, under boringly formulaic motivations and plot twists.

This is harmless stuff, and sometimes it's actually pretty funny, too.

Equally as brainless, shrill and calculated as its two predecessors.

The flashbacks are wittily gothic, and the present-day murder scenes have the absurdist, chain-reaction intricacy of the "Final Destination" deaths.

This is less a coming-out tale than a showcase for late-middle-aged hysterical divas in flowing caftans to yell, scream and ride roughshod over the young homosexuals who are nominally the movie's center.

There’s no point slamming this fart-and-burp teen flick, since the chortles of the 11-year-old boys -- and the men with an 11-year-old's disposition -- at a recent mall screening can't be denied.

Might make a fun Lifetime TV movie -- if it weren't quite so morose.

Other lumps of coal in this celluloid stocking include director Joe Roth's leaden pacing - like trudging through heavy snow - and screenwriter Chris Columbus' tireless affinity for pain gags.

Fails to fulfill.

If it was simply a jokey commentary on the dangers of greed and religious fervor, Tortilla Heaven would be forgivable. But Hecht Dumontet deserves special derision for her hypocritical condescension toward Falfúrrias' simple-folk caricatures, rendering them as God-fearing dolts worthy of scorn until the patronizing finale, which tries for a spiritual uplift that's as disingenuous as it is incompetently executed.

A Freudian nightmare with a lead who looks like the guy who runs your local pizzeria, Maniac also features one of the great head explosions in cinema history.

This movie's already been entertaining (or boring) airline passengers for months.

The humor stays on one low level throughout, and thus fades fast.

Mutates halfway through into a ham-fisted action movie that squanders the good will, and insults the intelligence, of its audience.

The only real-life situations the movie evokes vividly are the circumstances of its own production: underrehearsed actors in hastily staged scenes speaking page after page of awkward expository dialogue.

It'll give fans exactly what they expect while passing unseen by anyone else.

The execution is actually worse than the premise. Nonstop racial, sexual and cultural stereotypes parade across the screen with little wit or real humor to guide them.

The Zodiac regurgitates a lifetime of police-thriller conventions, adding an aura of laughable solemnity in the hope of making the plot seem less banal.

It's noisy, it's flashy, and it's deadly dull -- without the goofball, horror-nerd energy of Kevin Williamson, who wrote the first film, this essentially storyless picture, written by Trey Callaway and directed by Danny Gan-non, revolves doggedly around Hewitt's tits.