I'm only devoted to steering you away from this shit!
Rose McGowan is an actress that's really easy to get tired of, her one note being a rather abrasive one without enough wit or charm to it to make it bearable. Luckily for this movie, Dearly Devoted came into existence at the only point in her career when it could possibly have done any business at all, not too long after Scream made her (or, rather, her nipples) known to the world.
You know the story; crazy high school girl develops a crush on her teacher and goes berserk when he spurns her advances. You'd think that this would, virtually by default, manage to improve upon Alicia Silverstone's take on this story in The Crush, but that would only mean you've yet to see Dearly Devoted for yourself.
So McGowan stars as Debbie, little miss stalker-chick. Her parents die in a mysterious fire (hmm, mysterious) so she's sent to live with her grandmother, the kind of with-the-times lady who says things like "Hmm, you didn't sound Asian on the phone" and tries dressing her granddaughter in the most unrevealing outfits she can stitch out of fifty bolts of cloth. Granny is prone to searching the girl's room, leaving one to wonder why this girl would place her diary right there where it begs to be plundered; I've heard of hiding in plain sight, but this crosses the line into just not hiding at all. Debbie befriends a hunky teacher (Alex McArthur, who really isn't that hunky) and volunteers in helping him out at his garage sale. I never knew any teachers who asked for volunteers to help them with household errands, but then, I never knew any teachers who still called it a garage sale when it's held in the yard.
Everything else in this plot you can see coming from six blocks away, around three corners, hiding behind a car. The script, courtesy of six people (one of whom is daughter of George Carlin; if she inherited any of dad's wit, the other five writers did their best to wedge it out) is a good reminder that while it's sometimes okay to plunder other plots, you should take good care to recycle something worthwhile. I mean, c'mon, it's straight-to-cable. That's half of any review for this movie right there.
McGowan's performance is everything you'd expect of somebody whose best effort to salvage her failing bad-girl status was to marry Marilyn Manson. Yep, one-liners a-plenty. McArthur is marginally likeable in that he doesn't make as many incredibly stupid decisions as he might, but we're mostly glad he's here because it's only in the scenes with him that Sherrie Rose gets topless (which is often).
If there's anything to admire about Dearly Devoted, it's got to be the way it captures the vapid, almost unconscious cruelty high schoolers continue to subject each other to (never mind that there isn't a student in this school that looks younger than, oh, 26). No matter how pretty, popular, smart, sweet, or well-liked you are, if you trip and fall on your face, nobody's going to say "Are you okay?" when they can say "What a spaz!"
Also known as Devil In The Flesh, and directed by Steve Cohen.
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