YOUNG SEXY & DEAD

Rating: 7/10

Director and Writer: Philip Alderton

Style: Dark Comedy/ Mockumentary

Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Reviewed by Mike Szymanski

What a perfect time for a film about the excesses of skinny beauty and being thin — almost as if you were dead.

Director and writer Philip Alderton takes a mockumentary look at the world of modeling, photography and image-making, especially when it comes to supermodels, advertising campaigns and female beauty. A scenario like this is bound to happen, especially when kooky-creative people are given full license to do whatever they want.

The modeling characters are exaggerated and over-the-top as you might expect in this world, but suddenly their creativity and their bizarre stretch for immortality and fame take a frighteningly dark turn. This story may keep you up, thinking about how depraved we have become as a society to accept such things.

The problem is, I wonder if this ever did really happen!

The set-up is that this is secret footage supposedly destroyed of a model who became a superstar practically overnight.

These found-footage films are wonderful, because they forgive poor camerawork or uneven storylines. It pieces together what is happening, usually with footage that seems superfluous and unnecessary.

Some of the best found-footage films are like “The Blair Witch Project,” “Unfriended,” “Cloverfield,” “Paranormal Activity” and “District 9.” Each of these has the footage found after some big disaster or life-changing event, and a lot of what you are watching is sometimes boring. In this movie, nothing gets boring.

Still cute Jeremy London plays a sleazy agent who collects models more for himself than for their potential superstar abilities. He’s the actor from “Mallrats” and “I’ll Fly Away” not to be confused with his identical twin brother Jason London who starred in “The Man in the Moon” and “Dazed and Confused.”

The movie has a great kind of ensemble ad-lib feel to is, much like Christopher Guest’s mock-umentaries like “Best in Show,” “The Mighty Wind” and “Waiting for Guffman.” This time, the target is the fashion industry, and a model who is becoming the new look of an upscale brand.

But the model, Cynthia, (played by Ivy Levan) in her quest to stay skinny, takes an overdose od drugs and is dead. That sends the whole planned campaign on its hind legs, and rather than lose the millions of dollars in earnings all the way down the line, everyone agrees to shoot the dead girl as a model.

The idea seems viable at first, even to the point of getting the model’s mother to comply with the scheme.

However, things get real when the body begins to bloat up after a few days and they have to squeeze her out to maintain her figure ending up in very non-ladylike flatulence.

You can still be “in” even if you’re dead, is the motto of the story, and you can fix everything in digital.

The mastermind who takes the credit of this sick creative project is a flamboyant Claudio, played delightfully by Steven Berkoff. His character is quite extreme and doesn’t seem to care that his starlet is a corpse, but tries to get other models to be sexual with her.

The film switches to some arts black-and-white shots as if we are looking through the lens of the camera with the photographer and sees what he sees.

You’ll feel a bit guilty about laughing at this movie. It’s like the Belgian mock-umentary “Man Bites Dog” where the audience is following a documentary film crew recording what a serial killer is doing and suddenly you realize that you are a party to it all. You are laughing, and you are a conspirator.

The characters may be right out of “Zoolander,” but nothing will compare to the traumatic reality and surprising twists of what’s going on in “Young, Sexy & Dead.”

The movie is distributed by Lion Heart Entertainment and can be found on Tubi and will be released internationally in early 2024.

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