Cert 12A, 91mins

The most eagerly hated movie in America is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Paris Hilton that has drawn nothing but poisonous reviews. The vitriol is astonishing. On the IMDB movie website The Hottie & The Nottie has been voted the worst film ever made. This righteous indignation is at preposterous odds with a perfectly run-of-the-mill and rather sweet romantic comedy.

True, if you tap the film with a teaspoon it would promptly fall into implausible bits. And there’s something decidedly creepy about the premise. Joel David Moore plays a serial romantic loser called Nate who returns to LA after 20 years to look for the girl he fell in love with at the age of 6. The good news for Nate is that his first-grade sweetheart, Cristabel (Hilton), has sprouted into a sizzlingly gorgeous socialite who is still miraculously single. The bad news is that she won’t date the infatuated stalker until he supplies a boyfriend for her nightmarishly ugly best friend, June Phigg (Christine Lakin). The beauty-and-the-beast comedy hinges on Nate’s desperate efforts to bribe men to sleep with Lakin’s warty dwarf while he is routinely tortured by tantalising encounters with a barely dressed Hilton.

It’s plonkingly obvious stuff. The director, Tom Putnam, dribbles over Hilton as myopically as his hapless and unappealing hero does. Her dreamy smiles and teasing winks are as inviting as her soft-core poses. The camera caresses every curve. If you turned off the lights she’d probably glow.

To demolish Hilton’s performance is to miss the only genuinely amusing irony the film has to offer. The actress doesn’t actually act. Why bother when it’s so much easier, and a lot more fun, playing a wholesome fantasy version of yourself? This parody is the divine joke: a heavenly reminder of how fabulously unfair real life is for the rest of us plain mortals.

Putnam and Hilton are perfectly aware of the lucrative wisdom of cashing in on the star’s saucy reputation. There is a calculated shot of Hilton jogging down the beach at Santa Monica in slow motion à la Bo Derek in the film 10. It’s far too smart a reference to the iconic moment in Blake Edwards’ 1979 comedy about male sexual inadequacy to be written off as sheer vanity.

Even so, the film is alarmingly indulgent at times, and tooth-pullingly slow to reach the predictable fairytale twists. Nate inevitably starts falling in love with the feral-looking June. The process is eventually accelerated by Johann Urb’s ridiculously hunky dentist, who starts working on June’s teeth with selfless abandon. By the time he finishes clipping her infected toenails and unsightly body hair, Lakin has blossomed from Exorcist duckling to catwalk swan. Hilton is sublimely indifferent to the drama. Why worry, or even think, when you’re so easy on the eye?

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