Loretta: What is wrong with you?

Amber: I don't know. I just didn't want to win like this.

Loretta: You stop right there. You are a good person. Good things happen to good people.

Amber: Really?

Loretta: No, it's pure bullshit, sweetie. You're lucky as hell, so you might as well enjoy it.

It's comforting to believe in a universe where good deeds are rewarded and bad behavior is punished, but karma is nothing more than an attractive fantasy. We do our best for the sake of doing our best, and sometimes our hard work pays off. But just as often, it doesn't. Idiots stumble into greatness. And good people — deserving people — never amount to anything.

In a perfect world, Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst) would be crowned Mount Rose American Teen Princess on the merits of her tap-dancing skills. Becky Leeman (Denise Richards), on the other hand, would be laughed out of the competition for her tone-deaf performance of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You."

In that same idealized world, Drop Dead Gorgeous, the movie that tells their story, would be considered an unmitigated cinematic triumph. But reality is a little more complicated than that.

Michael Patrick Jann's 1999 mockumentary follows Amber, Becky, and their fellow Mount Rose American Teen Princess contestants, a group of mismatched Minnesota high school girls vying for small-town glory. Urging Amber on is her foul-mouthed, beer-guzzling mother, Annette (Ellen Barkin), herself a former contestant, and Annette's best friend, the equally trashy Loretta (Allison Janney). On Becky's side: her dangerously enthusiastic mother Gladys (Kirstie Alley), who also happens to be head of the pageant committee. Tensions run high — and then the death toll starts mounting.

Upon its release, Drop Dead Gorgeous didn't amount to much. Despite a sharp, darkly comedic script by Lona Williams and memorable performances from Barkin, Alley, and Janney, among others, the movie failed to find an audience, earning a disappointing total gross of $10.5 million.

Some little-seen films at least earn critical acclaim, but Drop Dead Gorgeous wasn't so lucky. For the most part, critics were merciless: The film currently has a 28% rating on Metacritic, Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum gave it a "D," and Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote that Drop Dead Gorgeous "[makes] its audience wince through what may be a record number of miserably unfunny jokes."

But if Drop Dead Gorgeous were truly the disaster that contemporary critics made it out to be, it's unlikely anyone would still be talking about it 15 years later. (It was never a big enough production to join the ranks of infamous flops, such as Ishtar and Waterworld.) Instead, audiences over the past decade and a half have come to appreciate the unfairly maligned Drop Dead Gorgeous as a searingly funny satire. That is, if they can find it.

"In this age of total accessibility of everything, you can't Netflix this movie, and you can't download it off of iTunes," Jann, the film's director, told BuzzFeed. At the time of publication, a copy of the bare-bones DVD, now out of print, could be purchased on Amazon.com for $60. "This is the ultimate cult movie. You can't see it. I will loan someone my VHS copy for anyone that's interested."

The fact that the once-hated Drop Dead Gorgeous can now be called a cult classic complicates the narrative of failure. Now that it's shifted from box office bomb to misunderstood treasure, can the film be considered a belated success? However unconventional, a circuitous path toward victory isn't entirely unheard of. As anyone who has seen Drop Dead Gorgeous can tell you, losing the beauty queen crown isn't the end of the world.

Amber Atkins may have been a runner-up, but she got what she wanted in the end. And all it took was a freak explosion, a serious case of food poisoning, and a stray bullet to get her to the top. Success may not be based on merit, but it's arbitrary enough to sometimes work itself out eventually.