You know “Beastly,” a lame contemporary take on “Beauty and the Beast,” is headed for a quick trip to the DVD remainder bin when an obnoxious Aryan prepster (Alex Pettyfer of “I Am Number Four”) actually looks cooler after a witch (Mary-Kate Olsen) decides to teach him a lesson by disfiguring our hero with scars and tattoos.
Installed in a Brooklyn penthouse with a wisecracking blind tutor (Neil Patrick Harris) and a wise Jamaican maid (Lisa Gay Hamilton) by his even shallower, embarrassed anchorman dad (Peter Krause), this motorcycle-riding beast must find a woman to love him within a year to break the spell.
A former classmate (Vanessa Hudgens of “High School Musical”) he previously disdained as insufficiently hot is forced to move in with him when her addict father accidentally kills somebody. Though Pettyfer delivers precisely the same wooden performance before and after the change, she somehow doesn’t recognize this suddenly gentle soul who woos her with poetry and his newly acquired gardening skills.
“Beastly” more than lives up to its name with ultra-campy performances, high-glucose direction (Daniel Barnz), laughable dialogue, cheesy effects and a back-lot simulation of a Manhattan street that wouldn’t pass muster on an after-school special.