Although far more tolerable than last year's Drop Dead Gorgeous, Drowning Mona still falls into the expanding and unwelcome category of working-class black comedies that seem constructed from conversations overhead in supermarket checkout lines and the hazy recollection of having seen Fargo. Set in Verplanck, New York, a town that's never quite recovered from serving as a test market for the Yugo, Drowning Mona features Bette Midler as the titular Mona, a shrill, castrating, unlikable matriarch who rides the town's vehicle of choice into eternity in the film's opening sequence. When kindhearted police chief Danny DeVito sets out to investigate, he finds that virtually any of the town's simian-like simpletons (whose ranks include Neve Campbell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Affleck, William Fichtner, and Will Ferrell) could have done her in, and no one really cares to find out who did. Affleck and DeVito both manage some nice moments, but Drowning Mona's contempt for its characters—and for lives spent in ignorance of IKEA catalogs and bottled water—taints what few funny moments sneak through. A real director stuck in a movie that doesn't require one, Nick Gomez's response is simply to film everything in the style of the countless forgotten comedies in constant rotation on cable. Look for Drowning Mona to join them soon.