A scene from Britney Ever After biopic. Photo / YouTube
A scene from Britney Ever After biopic. Photo / YouTube
She usually only slays vampires.
But Sarah Michelle Gellar couldn't resist jamming a stake in the Britney Spears Lifetime movie which premiered in America to ridicule on Saturday night.
Britney Ever After was a trending topic on Twitter, and the trend was a downward one as it was universally slammed.
"Omg is anyone else watching #britneyeverafter?? 'Get out the crackers because Joey is bringing the cheese' that's a direct quote!!' she tweeted - and she wasn't lying.
The most shocking moment - for Gellar anyway - came in one tense clip she posted, in which one of Britney's friends seems to say, "I can't believe that we partied with Buffy last night - that was so effing cool".
"#OppositeofOscar," Gellar tweeted, but many of her followers reassured her that they were in fact referring to 'Puffy' - ie Sean Puff Daddy Combs.
"Pulling your wisdom teeth with no drugs painful," "abortion," "train wreck," "the worst thing I've ever seen" and "cinematic gold" were among the descriptions tweeted, although that last one may have been sarcastic.
Many lamented the fact that there was no Britney Spears music in it, as Spears herself had unsurprisingly wanted nothing to do with it.
Besides cheesy anonymous music, her covers of The Rolling Stones Satisfaction and Joan Jett's I Love Rock n Roll were the only tunes that made the cut.
Many more wanted to know how Lifetime found out Britney and Justin Timberlake had made a sex tape, which got stolen and then recovered without anyone ever leaking it.
There was a spike in tweets during the movie's standout sequence, when Natasha Bassett's Britney and Nathan Keyes' Justin had a bizarre post break-up dance-off in the middle of a crowded nightclub.
"I forgot Britney and Justin had a dance-off in a club a few months after they broke up. Thank u, Lifetime, for the memory," one viewer tweeted.
Another perfectly summarized what everyone else seemed to be trying to express: "omg this Britney Lifetime movie isn't even hilariously bad - it's just bad."
Despite being two hours long, there was pretty much no mention of Spears' childhood, discovery or lead-up to her fame; with just as little attention given to her life post-meltdown.
The first 45 minutes of the movie consisted mainly of Britney (Natasha Bassett) and Justin (Nathan Keyes) giggling and mauling each other.
It being a Lifetime movie, it doesn't get any more R-rated than that in her frequent dalliances ... and the audience certainly didn't get to see them make the alleged sex tape.
The disjointed format jumps back and forth between an interview with modern day Spears, who it is very clear has never gotten over Timberlake.
The film appears to suggest her split from Timberlake was the beginning of her downward spiral.
"You gotta reign it in," her manager Larry Rudolph (Peter Benson) tells her as she starts her partying ways, "or you're gonna do serious damage to your brand".
Her first marriage to childhood friend Jason Alexander meanwhile is given as much airtime as it got in real life.
The next chapter in Spears' life thumbs through like a flip book: one moment she's making out with Kevin Federline (Clayton Chitty), the next he's proposing, the one after that she's pining over her two fully grown children.
In a fitting revenge, she later texts him: "I wnt 2 dvrce U" - a 'quote' that appears to have been taken from a Fox News headline after that news broke in 2006.
From there it's just scene after scene of public Spears breakdowns: sitting in the middle of a road crying; wiping food on and not bothering to return a five-figure designer dress during a photo shoot; and of course her infamous head-shave and subsequent brolly-swinging attack on a gang of paparazzi.
In August Spears' rep told Dailymail.com that the singer "will not be contributing in any way, shape or form to the Lifetime biopic nor does it have her blessing".
Lifetime previously has produced the 2015 biopic Whitney about the late singing superstar Whitney Houston and the 2014 biopic Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B about the late singer Aaliyah Haughton.
