Bottom of the Barrel

New Best Friend is so bad you'll wish you were in a coma

Comments (0) By Robert Wilonsky Thursday, Apr 11 2002

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It's never a good sign when a film's star spends the entirety of the film in a coma; it's worse when you begin to envy her condition. This direct-to-Beta bummer stars Mia Kirshner (Not Another Teen Movie) as Alicia, a lower-class student at an elite, upper-class North Carolina college that looks less like an institution of higher learning than a set piece for an E! Wild Onspecial. In flashbacks, it's revealed that Alicia has overdosed on pharmacy-quality coke--who hasn't?--and the local sheriff (Taye Diggs, in a remarkably wrong-headed bit of casting) is investigating the OD as possible homicide. Alicia's one of those ugly fucklings adopted by the in-crowd--in this case, Meredith Monroe, who looks like a young Sally Kellerman; Dominique Swain as a lipstick lesbian; and Rachel True, who's truly awful--who sheds her skin around the same time she sells her soul; she gets what's coming to her. Director Zoe Clarke-Williams is just as confused about her message--booze and drugs are bad...but fun!--as she is about where to point the camera; the movie looks like a bad acid trip, except when it's supposed to, when it just looks plain wretched (like a blind man's idea of "art"). This film seems to exist solely to prove there is something beneath the bottom of the barrel; if it's not the worst film of the millennium, it's solely because it's not worth making the case for or against its atrociousness.