Coyote Ugly

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Ah, one of my very favorite bad movies. Not the best of its genre, to be sure, but if you don’t have the stamina for a viewing of Showgirls, maybe a light serving of Coyote Ugly will do.

Highlights include:
- Female lead with all the charisma, appeal and acting ability of a fresh box of Kleenex.
- Boring romantic interest who doesn’t quite pass as Australian even though the actor actually is Australian.
- Completely unbelievable scene is which the heroine subdues a bar full of horny drunken men with her weak ass rendition of “One Way or Another”, despite her pathetic paper thin voice and total lack of any hotness whatsoever. Right. RIGHT.
- Random and distressing appearance of Melanie Lynskey, an actress who can act rings around anyone else in the cast, as the best friend of the lead. She later plays the same damn role in Sweet Home Alabama. What the hell, Mel?
- Strange and unexplained power to make me drop anything else I may be doing and watch the entire film anytime it shows up on cable.

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The only thing that redeems that movie in my eyes is the prescence of John Goodman. I would pay to hear him read his laundry list.

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Sigh. I actually saw this in the theatre, lured in by the presence of Goodman/Lynskey. Imagine my disappointment.

It's okay...in a guilty pleasure, Center Stage, I-can't-believe-I'm-sitting-here kind of way.

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Hah. I just posted how much I hated this movie in the Worst. Movie. Ever. thread. Lo and behold, there's a thread devoted to its badness.

The gist of my earlier post is that the badness of Coyote Ugly caught me unaware. I'm prepared to accept that if I'm walking in to, say, Gigli or Battlefield Earth, but even Rotten Tomatoes has some positive reviews of the subject movie. It's the ambush that raises my fury, and I've got a mild vendetta to make sure no one ever gets caught in the same trap.

[woopdedoo]

Okay, I may be embarrassing myself by asking this question, but what exactly does "Coyote Ugly" mean? I was under the impression it's some kind of nasty slang. Sorry if this is obvious to everyone else. I'm old, what can I say.

[bbug]

IIRC, "Coyote Ugly" refers to waking up to someone really, really ugly after a night out when you got blitzed.

This was SUCH a bad movie, with an awful seduction scene in a room full of cardboard cutouts more talented than half the cast. It was so bad, though, that it almost looped back around to endearingly awful.

[vacationland]

IIRC, "Coyote Ugly" refers to waking up to someone really, really ugly after a night out when you got blitzed.

That's part of it...the "coyote" part comes from the humorous exaggeration about how you'd get away from the fugly one-night-stand: you'd chew off your own arm if it were stuck underneath the fug, like a coyote caught in a trap.

Hence, that date wasn't just have-an-akward-parting-the-morning-after ugly, that date was chew-off-your-own-arm-to-get-away fugly: coyote ugly.

[woopdedoo]

Heh, that's pretty good!

Not that I've ever experienced that, of course.

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As Myrnalene noted, that one scene alone -- where the heroine subdues the out-of-control room by bursting in a rendition of "One Way Or Another" qualifies this movie for "one of the worst ever." First of all, we've had it drilled into our heads that, supposedly, she's a great song-writer but it is stricken with paralyzing stage-fright and so cannot perform her own music. Then she leaps up and starts belting out a tune to distract a bunch of out-of-control strangers...?

And usually any dance scene can make me smile, but the cut-away shots were so obvious (even to me) that it ruined any illusion whatsoever that the actresses were doing anything more than tossing their hair and shaking their shoulders. I don't think there was a single shot in the whole movie where you saw the actresses from head to toe while "dancing."

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To kick the dead mule of that scene even further: the inspiration for her kareoke coming-out is that the roomfull of drunken patrons has dragged one of the hottie bartenders off of the bar, and are apparently about to take her outside and gang-rape her, thus inspiring our heroine to attempt the distraction. However, this violent, lustful mob is persuaded to put it back in their collective pants by the aforementioned thin-voiced kareoke of 'One Way or Another'.

How about the notion that these girls are taking in hundreds a night in tips? Yet we rarely ever see them actually tipped? And the kind of people who hang out in a bar where they insult you for ordering anything other than Beer or Whiskey, and who enjoy being periodically hosed down by the bartenders, usually aren't your biggest tippers.