Beautiful Creatures trends on Netflix – despite scathing critic reviews

Good news for fans of romantic gothic fantasy films in the Twilight mould comes courtesy of Beautiful Creatures landing on Netflix in the UK.

And, looking at Netflix's trending list clearly plenty of subscribers are fans of Beautiful Creatures.

Which is just a little bit intriguing as the new to Netflix movie has a lowly 47% critic score over at review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

Even the usually friendlier audience score sits at a deflating 54%, too – and that's based on over 25,000 review scores.

Is this a case of streamers ignoring critics, then?

Many of the 'Top Critics' on Rotten Tomatoes are not kind at all to Beautiful Creatures.

Tara Brady of the Irish Times says the film's "special effects are rarely special. Bad movie practice looms large as characters have private conversations out in the open or worse again, narrate the action."

While Peter Travers of Rolling Stone says that, "Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson overact so strenuously and with such outrageously awful Southern accents that you fear the damage this crock may do to their reputations."

While maybe most damning is Wesley Morris of Grantland, who confidently states that, "Beautiful Creatures is like the Twilight movies but with a chaperone making sure the boys dance a foot apart from the girls."

However, this criticism is balanced out somewhat by other reviews that are more positive.

Larushka Ivan-Zadeh of Metro.co.uk, for example, says that, "the massive plus this gothic teen romance has over Twilight is that it's frequently funny - intentionally."

While Joel Arnold of NPR states that Beautiful Creatures is a, "surprisingly beguiling attempt to blend fantasy, coming-of-age drama, melodrama, camp and social critique isn't always successful - but it's nearly always entertaining."

While Caryn James of James on screenS concludes that the movie is, "sumptuous-looking, crisply directed, wonderfully cast and far wittier than the drippy, earnest Twilight Saga. A captivating tale with a tongue-in-cheek sense of play."

Regardless of this critical response, though, UK Netflix subscribers are clearly digging Beautiful Creatures with the movie trending on the streaming service.

My take is that anything with Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson is worth watching, regardless of how schlocky it may be. I'm also a fan of Alden Ehrenreich, too, who I last saw in Hail, Caesar! as Hobie Doyle. So I'll keep Beautiful Creatures in mind for when I want something that's easy to watch in a Twilight kind of way.

Beautiful Creatures is available to stream right now on Netflix UK.