Brokedown Palace

So stunningly awful and perversely enjoyable that it virtually qualifies as a must-see, Brokedown Palace is a hilariously incompetent women-in-prison drama which will do well to last more than a week at the 'plexes, so you might have to wait for the video.

It's about a pair of supremely naïve American teenage girlies (Danes and Beckinsale) who get unwittingly duped into smuggling a barrel-load of smack out from Thailand, and then have to run the gauntlet of what passes for the Thai justice system.

The first few scenes are quite a buzz: the happy idiots arrive in Bangkok and loaf around swimming pools sipping cocktails for a few days, before the first good-looking guy they encounter (a visible sleazeball from any other perspective) charms the pants off them and gives them free flights to Australia. Obviously, the poor dears never make it out of the airport, and their fate is sealed when they're dim-witted enough to sign confessions written in a completely foreign language.

Prison, when it arrives, is a piece of cake - I've lived in flats that were more squalid and crowded than this. A cockroach crawls inside Beckinsale's ear with about half an hour left, but otherwise it's fairly plain sailing for the unfortunate pair. Their physical attractiveness doesn't even diminish one iota during their incarceration.

Otherwise, Brokedown Palace is a massively enjoyable movie by virtue of its pure dreadfulness, and careers towards an unbelievably ridiculous and contrived ending, which will literally have your jaw dropping. How to sum up how bad it is? Well, Lou Diamond Phillips is in it. Now do you get the picture?