Nobody on the planet remembers Beastly 

It’s time women reclaim Frankenskank

Kyle could have just went to a goth club and found a girl.

Imagine falling in love with a grisly brooding goth man and he turns into a blonde, blue eyed pretty boy

I can't imagine how difficult it could've been to a tall, ripped son of a millionaire covered in tattoos to find someone

Man I love this movie. The fact that the witch was like “you bullied me… I’m going to literally teach you a lesson, help improve your life and the life of this other girl, and also help your employees get green cards and miracle cures” like that’s so much more nice than she needed to be

"daddy don't got"

"frankenskank?" come on, skankenstein was *right there*

I thought that sentence was going to be “Kyles dad doesn’t love his son if he’s not beautiful, so he rents a new son.”

I know I’m late to the Green Party party on this one, but I actually was a fan of the book years ago. It’s been a long time, but here’s a few fun things I remember from the book, and don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say in the comments: • Lindy is basically forced to volunteer at the dance because she’s on a scholarship. • Kyle is straight up a beast. Like, with fur, and claws, which actually prevents him from going out in public but I guess they wanted him to be damaged but still sexy in the movies? • Since he can’t go out, Kendra, the witch, gives him a magic mirror, which he uses to look at the world and his old friends. • Lindy’s dad breaks into the house and when Kyle catches him, offers her up in exchange for him not called the police or eating him. • It’s strongly implied that, while Lindy had a crush on him because he was popular and handsome, if she’d really known him she would not have liked him. • The movie’s alternate ending is actually the ending of the book, since there is no Machu Pichu to act as their ticking time bomb in the book. • Also at the end it’s revealed that Zola was actually the witch the whole time. She was placed in his house as a punishment for going rogue, and she hated him so much she couldn’t help setting him up to get cursed. By wishing for Zola to be reunited with her family, she’s released from her punishment. I remember really enjoying the book, and it seems like it was a lot less clumsy than the movie. Edit: I can’t believe I forgot. Kyle is part of like…an online support group for people that have been turned into monsters/non-human creatures. The little mermaid is in this group.

Kyle becoming "beautiful" again is blatant gothphobia and I wont stand for it

You know it's a YA movie when the "beast" is the male equivalent of the pretty girl wearing glasses being "ugly".

"who's gonna view you as a potential love interest if you're beast?" im waiting for a modern beauty and the beast adaptation where belle is a furry and wants the beast to stay that way

In the book, he *did* actually get turned into a beast. He's described as looking like Chewbacca. In the movie, he looks like El Diablo from Suicide Squad.

The kinds of things Hollywood executives think is a curse: having a badass scar, living in a house paid for by your rich father, and being disabled.

In the book, he joined a chat room where he spoke with other teenagers that were afflicted with fairy tale curses 😂

I love how they removed the Prince being an orphan, and the witch phrased the curse so that _any_ love could count. Ergo, his dad could have loved him, which is like the bare minimum for a parent, and the dad doesn't love him enough to break the curse. Like, youch. And it's just so normalized for Kyle that apparently he's not even phased by literal proof his dad doesn't love him. Geez.

Neil's character is so ableist in a way that only the 2000's could be.

imagine being the facebook employee who looks through the reasons why people deactivate their accounts and seeing the words "i am no more"

Kyle: *is rude and sexist* *Lindy will not remember that*

I just read the book this is based on and I’m so sad. If they’d actually followed the book we literally could’ve had a kick line of Mary-Kate Olsen rockettes dancing in elf costumes in the middle of the night, with Lindy watching and thinking she’s hallucinating. That’s what they took from us.

holy shit ive watched this video so many times and only *just now* am i realizing that kyle's beast form has "embrace" and "suck" written on each of his eyebrows. they were so absurdly confident in that catchphrase that they literally wrote it on their protagonist's face

A modern beauty and beast adaptation, but he doesn't turn into literal beast. Instead he is cursed to be trapped in a fursuit, with anime eyes and everything. He can never take the fursuit off until someone falls in love with him.

In the book he actually turned into a beast. I don't know why he's turned into a hot topic employee

My favorite thing about bad movies: Hiring a sighted actor to play a blind character and said actor attempts to "act blind" by Simply Not Looking at anything they're doing and picking a random point in the room to stare at instead

What really murders me is that they were SO CLOSE with the mooning-over-the-picture thing. All she needed to say was "He was really handsome, but I was turned off by how he treated people" and that would have worked GREAT, and yet.

IRL Kyle would just become a super-popular instagram model with his new unique look

The movie keeps trying to tell me that Mary-Kate is supposed to be ugly, but I am absolutely into that witch look she's got going on.

The one thing I will give this movie props for is that it DOES feel a lot more believable for a teenage witch to be so petty as to curse someone for life than a grown woman witch with like taxes to do

okay so why didn’t they make the witch like the weird esoteric/witchy hippie girl? like the ones obsessed with crystals, astrology and tarot??? she could have been a normal teen that is bullied by kyle bc she’s “weird” and “not beautiful” and then theres a cut scene where she goes home and puts this curse on him like still would have been weird but works better for this “grim modern retelling” of the story than like a random woods witch

when he typed "I am no more" as the reason he was deleting his Facebook i felt a part of my soul leave my body

“Dad, if you say you love me, I’ll look normal again” “What? uh.. i love you i guess” **END OF MOVIE**

I remember this because Penny Arcade, of all things, did a comic of it. The punchline was: "I love you, despite how hot and covered in tattoos you are."

"Sloane and the Bimbots" is unironically an amazing band name

Beast: I think...I think I’m falling in love with you. Soundtrack: FaaaaLLIng In lOooVeeee!!!

I have only one complaint about this amazing movie: There’s no deaf Cogsworth character for the blind Lumiere to be gay with

In the book, he's described as genuinely hideous. Here, he looks like a guy a girl would bring home to piss off daddy.

I read the book and liked it much better than the movie, and it's because it leaned into the goofiness hard. There's an online support group for victims of magic spells and all of the other people in the group are also stand ins for modern adaptations of fairy tales. The Little Mermaid is in the group, and so is the Frog Prince and it's a running gag that he can't type well with his little amphibian hands. Also, in the book, he's an actual beast. Not just a tatted up, pierced, bald dude. Oh, also Zola and the witch are revealed to be the same person at the end. That's why the witch is always around Kyle whenever he looks for her.

omg she was green screened at the green party i cant

if someone doesn’t, at one point in my life, refer to me as a “self-mutilated tatted frankenskank” then what’s even the point

I know it's problematic lol but I do like the bit about the green card. My parents, my spouse, and lots of my friends are immigrants. Getting them is pretty miraculous. It's not mentioned often enough in US media how hard it is being a resident with family abroad. It's corny, and I know Zola is a stereotype, but seeing how happy she was looking at the photo of her son's green card moved me

imagine a world where beastly became more popular than twilight, and the internet is flooded with "still a better love story than beastly" memes

Imagine an emo 14 year old with self esteem issues going to therapy, and her third session is just watching Beastly with her therapist. I was that 14 year old.

I feel like this would have been even better if "Lindy" was played by Ashley Olsen and nobody ever acknowledged that they look exactly the same.

"Nice, Kyle, I'm sure your middle-aged Jamaican nanny really appreciated that zinger."

11:41 "Daddy don't got" I can't describe the way I wheezed at this line I'm crying actual tears right now fjshhsjsjsjsj

A black woman and a disabled person as stand ins for literal objects . . . uh . . . that's fine I guess

The movie is trash. It has virtually nothing in common with the book. The book was written by Alex Flinn, a lawyer who worked with teen offenders, so (in nearly all of her books) she wrote about teenagers who are genuinely terrible but unlearn the toxic behavior and thought patterns because they gain trusted adults and get away from the abusive or neglectful adults in their life. Kyle is turned into a Disney style beast. He never goes outside because he doesn't want anyone to see him or to end up in the Enquirer or whatever. He gives a flower to Lindy at the beginning because his gf was angry he didn't get her an orchid. Lindy is not Vanessa Hudgens... She is short with frizzy red hair, very crooked teeth, and wears almost solely musical merch because she wants to be a theater kid but is too shy and doesn't have time. She volunteers as much as she can in addition to getting As in school because she wants to go to college to escape her current situation. Her dad does break into Kyle's house in the book and when caught immediately and without prompting offers his teenage daughter in exchange for the security tape. Her dad is shown to be nothing but a pile of garbage, but Lindy still feels like she needs to take care of him. Part of her arc is learning how to have fun and be young. The blind tutor thing is explained because his dad specifically wants no one to tell the press about his son. He gives Kyle specific instructions that he should not tell the tutor about his condition. Kyle immediately telling him is a huge FU to his dad in the book, and the tutor doesn't fully believe him, getting pissed at first thinking he was trying to prank the blind guy. He also acts like a normal blind guy in the book. He isn't bitter. He lives a fairly fulfilling life, he was just offered an obscene amount of money and free room and board in a super nice apartment in exchange for teaching 1 teenager - then 2 teenagers. The witch is originally depicted as just a goth high school girl who Kyle and his friends regularly bully because she draws pentagrams on everything, has acne, and is fat.

The problem with modernizing Beauty and the Beast is that the original story was written to make teenage noblewomen not feel that bad about arranged marriages - like maybe you'll learn to love him even though he seems like a horrible old beast to you at first. How can you make people these days relate to that?

Can we talk about how NPH's character is blind and yet always makes eye contact with whoever he is speaking to? So considerate!

I love how Twilight had the idea of vampires but hot, while Beastly just had the idea of hot guy... *but ugly*

"best embrace the suck" im shaking what does this mean

If Kyle just joined a punk band he'd fit right in. He looks like he's got a bunch of body mods and tattoos. Everyone would love it.

I can defend exactly one element of this plot: He couldn't randomly grab two tickets on the fly because it takes over a year of waitlisting to get to see Machu Picchu. The school trip was probably planned / reserved as a group in advance.

My fiancé and I watched Beastly after seeing your essay, and I noticed Kyle/Hunter's eyebrows; they have Arabic letters on them. As an Arab, I was having a difficult time avoiding that. I was also having a difficult time reading it, until I noticed his left eyebrow; it looked liked "embrace", and then I looked at the right eyebrow again. It turns out the eyebrows were saying "Embrace" and "Suck" in ENGLISH but with ARABIC LETTERS THAT LOOK LIKE THEIR ENGLISH SCRIPTURE EQUIVALENT. We completely lost our minds. This would be the most unintentionally hilarious use of the Arabic language in cinema until Arrival couldn't get Arabic words written properly in news footage while the central topic of the film was ABOUT A LANGUAGE

If this was from belle’s perspective it would basically be a wattpad story

As a tattooed person with distinct facial piercings myself, if I saw Kyle walking down the street in his Beastly form, I'd ask what his prices were. Because that happens to me from time to time

I loved the book growing up because of how "tounge-in-cheek" it was especially with the fairy tale group chat it had randomly throughout, and I was legit SHOCKED about how straightforward they played the whole movie. Also it's worth noting that he was an actual beast in the book, not just whatever he is, and the alternate ending was the actual ending of the film.

facebook: why are you deleting your account? this edgelord: i am no m o r e

**deactivates account** Please tell us why *I am no more*

i like that they try to set up lindy as being interested in gardening because kyle builds her a greenhouse and they keep saying how much she loves roses, but gardening isn't even listed in her interests on facebook

I think it's funny that he also doesn't even look that bad, nothing about his physique changed and his face just kind of looks like someone who's midway into a body mod addiction. His bones structure is also intact in his face so he basically just has a scar, some weird tattoos, metal stuff, and a shaved head. Like, there are people that elect to do much worse to themselves and probably still have otherwise perfectly normal lives. There's no one on earth that can tell me this dude would have been *that* much worse off if he had to stay that way forever.

Neil Patrick Harris looks like he's suffering when forced to say "cage the rage"

Neil Patrick Harris has chemistry with EVERYONE.

12:28 BEASTZONED. Thank you for this gift. I will use it responsibly.

I have still, in 5 years, never been able to figure out what Best Embrace The Suck is even supposed to mean

The moral of the story? Disrespect an Olsen and you become Jared Letto's Joker.

So he's named Kyle "Kingson" because he's a prince. ...did they not realize "Prince" is a last name that exists?

I feel like a better ending is if Kyle changes back, and then thinks he's uglier because it reminds him of how ugly he used to be on the inside. It would have to happen sooner, so that he can take the time to get convinced that how he looks doesn't define who he is -- looking like Kyle, the asshole, doesn't define him any more than looking "Beastly" did.

"Daddy don't got" - Kyle Kingson, 2011

This is literally a Wattpad story adapted for the silver screen and nobody can convince me otherwise--random kidnapping? Melodramatic broody love interest? Main character with no semblance of a personality? Lazy story telling devices because the Plot Needs to Happen (i.e., witches)? He turns out hot in the end anyway because it's not a happy ending if they're both not hot? Wattpad.

Why did the witch vandalize his posters in that weird shade of peach?

Ah yes, I remember my highschool experience. Who can forget Kyle, Trisha, Johnny, Mildred of the gloomy pastures, or Jessica?

It should have ended like Shrek - Hunter floats in the air with light and magic erupting from his skin. But then it's revealed that he hasn't changed... Because he's already beautiful to her.

it's weird how they never circle back to Lindy's Drug Addicted Father straight up killed someone

"You killed him!" *"Crazy old Maurice"*

I remember beastly bc my local shopping mall had a gigantic wall dedicated to an ad for this film which was inexplicably around for like. several years.

Beastly is absolutely a 'The book was better' sort of thing. And Re: Kendra, there's a sort of sequel that reveals more of her backstory, other curses/times she's used magic and how it went poorly, all framed as her befriending the stepsister in the Cinderella story that's going on. Edit at 32:45-the alternat ending is closer to the book ending, honestly. Book has: -Actual Beast Kyle -Doctors say they literally can't undo it because it would kill him -subpoint-he tries shaving off his fur, thinks he'll just need daily waxing, and then it grows back instantly. He also has super healing for no clear reason. -Lindy's dad does break in to steal at the one year point [because book curse gives Kyle 2 years] and damages something in his rose garden, then offers Lindy in order to not die -Lindy's flat out scared of Kyle at first, and while he did try to win her over via making a bedroom with connected library over in the townhouse for her [Based upon books in her home, since he has a mirror to spy] she's only truly won over via classes after they've met face to face -IIRC, they meet because there's a thunderstorm and she goes downstairs to the living room where Kyle's watching TV, because thunderstorms scare her/remind her of gunshots due to growing up in a not-good neighborhood -Lots of bonding, exploring the attic, etc to show an actual build up of the relationship. -They go to a lodge, during winter, because Lindy wants to be able to play in the snow [as it's Winter] -She goes back because she uses the mirror to check in on her dad, who's Mid-ODing and she needs to go take care of him -Kyle doesn't give her a letter that I can recall, but I could be wrong -Side note: Kyle makes a deal with Kendra at some point that if he breaks the curse, Will gets his sight back and Zola is reunited with her family [Spoilers: Kendra and Zola are the same person since she was punished for the curse, and in breaking the curse she's reunited with her coven] -Kyle checks on Lindy with the mirror on occasion and one of those shows her being attacked-Either due to her dad trading her for drugs or due to her being alone in a bad neighborhood, since she was riding the subway every night to try finding him [There was a station she could see from the townhouse roof, she didn't know which one] -Runs out and goes to her to save her, gets shot, lives because she says she loves him. Ends up on the news because he didn't remember his winter coat/scarf to hide his beastly features -Some editions have a special section where you read Lindy's Diary and get her side of the story [I haven't read that version yet, don't know what's in it]

"And now he's a drug addict... which only pays slightly better..." God that was hilarious idk why

my absolute favourite detail of kyle's beastly face is that his eyebrows are replaced with tattoos of the words "EMBRACE" "SUCK"

I remember this movie cuz I was thirteen and in the theatre I yelled “kiss!” And everyone laughed and the girl I liked laughed and it was a great moment

PLEASE I know SO many women who would go crazy over an alternative guy with body modifications. Like seriously he’s have no issues dating I don’t think.

As a person with a severe visual impairment that glasses/contacts/surgery can’t cure, you are correct, I would much rather be blind than turned into a candle.

Okay.. the “house keepers” Jamaican accent is killing me. They make it sound like she can’t speak english. She doesn’t even speak in complete sentences. Did the writers not realize that English is literally Jamaica’s first language?? (My mother is Jamaican and literally one of the most well spoken people I know so this is ridiculous to me)

4:15 frankenskank might be the most iconic insult I've ever heard 10 outta 10

HOW DID JENNY NOT MENTION THAT LINDY'S FACEBOOK INTERESTS INCLUDE CHE GUEVARA?!?!?!

It's dumb to think that those tattoos and scars (and staples?) would ruin his love life for eternity, have ever seen a person with body mods? All he has to do is go to a heavy metal concert

In addition to Jenny's harsh criticism of this beastly bad movie, the most glaringly obvious knock on this movie is that no one wore anything green to the Green Party's party.

Fun fact: if you look closely at his eyebrow tats, the "symbols" that make them up are just "embrace the suck" in a weird font.

I always assumed Zola was supposed to be an undocumented immigrant or refugee, suggesting that she was "trapped" in employment and being pressured to stay quiet about Kyle's appearance, but the self-hating disabled tutor is weird and unnecessary. This movie is so strangely iconic, what a fever dream

When I was a scholastic kid reporter, I went to the opening of Alex Rider. On the red carpet I was visibly anxious. Alex Pettyfer was also extremely anxious, and when he saw me he said "Christ mate you're as terrified as I am" and gave me a hug. I was so disappointed that Alex Rider sucked.

But he just looks like any SoundCloud rapper with face tats

My 60+ year old mother LOVES this movie and I've watched it with her at least 3 times.

It's the fact that the tattoos magically shift with the seasons for me. Like that's so unbelievably cool, why would you ever wanna give that up?

shoutout to jenny for making a 45 minute video about a movie i never watched so i can procrastinate harder in the first week of university

Kyle looks like If Riverdale tried to do Avatar: The Last Airbender

Why doesn’t the witch just go around magically granting green cards to people in need?

As someone who read the original book years ago, I can confirm that the whole idea with lindy's father breaking in to Kyles house to steal money was exactly what happened, from my vague recollections. ... oh, and he was an actual beast. So yeah, I can't confirm how well it holds up, but there are at least elements the book did better imo

best embrace the *S U C C*

What gets me is that I'm pretty sure the Enchantress says the curse can be lifted by someone saying "I love you" - not someone actually loving them, just saying "I love you".

ok can we talk about how they got a non disabled actor to play a character who constantly talks about how awful it is to be disabled?