This movie has a great title and a soundtrack that doesn't completely suck, which is better than usual for this sort of dirt cheap, desperate-to-make-a-movie filmmaking. You know what Apocalypse and the Beauty Queen doesn't have? Actors who can act, a script that makes sense or a director that knows his ass from a hole in the ground.
Set in a resource depleted future where the U.S. government has collapsed, Queen Amber (Beverly Hynds) is the tyrant of Cachney County. A former New York City supermodel who had to go crawling home after her beauty started to fade, Amber is described in the film as having used her "big city skills" to assemble a fighting force and set herself up as the local warlord. I didn't realize that supermodels in the Big Apple were trained in military strategy and tactics. See what you learn watching crappy movies like this?
A young woman named Sylvie (Courtney Kauffman Kocak) is kidnapped to serve Queen Amber and gets caught up in the intrigue and betrayal of her inner circle. It's not much of an inner circle, though. There's this guy named Matthew (Carlos Gonzalez-Vio) who looks like a boy band reject and a chick named Angel (Katie Rudisel) who just hangs around. Queen Amber's military might is also rather paltry, consisting of a few bedazzled rifles and two bounty hunters named D.K. (Mack 10) and Scotty (Thomas Allen Beckett). I can only describe them by saying if someone ate a copy of Hamlet, D.K. and Scotty would be the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the resultant turd.
Sylvie, who narrates most of the film with even less conviction than Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, falls in love with Matthew and tries to overthrow Queen Amber and
well, it's kind of hard to relate the rest of the plot because it doesn't really stand up to logical scrutiny or even follow basic rules of causality. I can say that Sylvie and Angel both get naked (though not with each other), several people get killed off camera for either reasons of cheapness or the director's inability to film a convincing shooting, Queen Amber spends a lot of time laughing a really fake-sounding laugh, there are 4 flashbacks but none of them involve the main character of Sylvie, and there's a rival warlord in the neighboring county who is introduced and then summarily killed off for no other possible reason than simply to stretch this production out so it could be passed off as a feature film.
The folks who made Apocalypse and the Beauty Queen clearly had no money and not much more experience when they started production, so it might be unfair to judge them too harshly. They're like many other people who dreamed of being in cinema and took advantage of modern filmmaking technology to make it happen. If this thing were only an elaborate home movie that they shared with friends and family, I'd tip my cap to them for living their dream.
Unfortunately for every human being on Earth, Apocalypse and the Beauty Queen got burned onto who knows how many DVDs and offered up for sale and rent. That means some number of entertainment-seeking consumers will spend money to watch this, which is a crying shame. This movie is disheartening twaddle, made by talentless simpletons and featuring oblivious fools. Watching grass grow would be a better use of your time.
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