It's not worth going on too long about this semi-supernatural thriller. The young, cute, predatory-looking blond Izabella Miko attends the funeral of her erstwhile best friend at a remote New England estate ruled by Miko's ex lover, Austin Nichols as Roderick Usher.
The two of them are rather gloomy. I mean, what with the suicide of the best friend and all. The atmosphere isn't helped by the presence of the housekeeper, Beth Grant, made up like a vampire, so much so that Madonna would look like a fresh-faced virgin beside her.
The general air of dread doesn't keep Miko from spending a lot of time wandering about the mansion in her underwear. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I do it all the time myself. The problem is that these scenes are the highlights of the film! This is worse than Edgar Allan Poe's worst hang over. The photography is atmospheric enough and the location aptly chosen but everything else seems slapped together. It resembles a carefully conceived feature film the way a child's rolled-together limbs and torso made of clay, topped by a tiny ball of a head, resembles a human being.
Nobody in it can act, but -- that aside -- the story itself makes no sense. Edgar wouldn't have cared too much about that, but he had other things going for him, whereas this has only Miko's buns. Of the three principles, Miko is least bad, Nichols is well into negative territory, and Grant's every utterance reminds us that she's trying to act in a movie.
At first, after doing her grief work, Miko comes on the Nichols, smooching him up, her wide-open lips revealing glistening incisors of frightening dimensions. He demurs. His neurasthenia prevents him from responding. Later, when she arranges matters less formally and straddles his lap, he apologies because he still can't perform. There is another murky scene in which she toys with the belt of his robe. Next thing -- pow! -- she's pregnant with twins. What is this, coitus interruptus without the coitus? The least the director could do is throw us an explicit and climactic scene of strenuous coupling.
"Neurasthenia," the mysterious disease from which Roderick Usher suffers, is an old-fashioned term, current enough in Freud's period of disorganized nomenclature. It was used to refer to what we might call chronic fatigue today, combined with a little attention-getting irritability.
But why am I going on about neurasthenia, you ask? Because I think I caught it from this movie. I notice it particularly in regard to my black cat, Pluto, a fiend from hell. I keep telling him, "Just keep it up, that's all." But does he listen?
The two of them are rather gloomy. I mean, what with the suicide of the best friend and all. The atmosphere isn't helped by the presence of the housekeeper, Beth Grant, made up like a vampire, so much so that Madonna would look like a fresh-faced virgin beside her.
The general air of dread doesn't keep Miko from spending a lot of time wandering about the mansion in her underwear. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I do it all the time myself. The problem is that these scenes are the highlights of the film! This is worse than Edgar Allan Poe's worst hang over. The photography is atmospheric enough and the location aptly chosen but everything else seems slapped together. It resembles a carefully conceived feature film the way a child's rolled-together limbs and torso made of clay, topped by a tiny ball of a head, resembles a human being.
Nobody in it can act, but -- that aside -- the story itself makes no sense. Edgar wouldn't have cared too much about that, but he had other things going for him, whereas this has only Miko's buns. Of the three principles, Miko is least bad, Nichols is well into negative territory, and Grant's every utterance reminds us that she's trying to act in a movie.
At first, after doing her grief work, Miko comes on the Nichols, smooching him up, her wide-open lips revealing glistening incisors of frightening dimensions. He demurs. His neurasthenia prevents him from responding. Later, when she arranges matters less formally and straddles his lap, he apologies because he still can't perform. There is another murky scene in which she toys with the belt of his robe. Next thing -- pow! -- she's pregnant with twins. What is this, coitus interruptus without the coitus? The least the director could do is throw us an explicit and climactic scene of strenuous coupling.
"Neurasthenia," the mysterious disease from which Roderick Usher suffers, is an old-fashioned term, current enough in Freud's period of disorganized nomenclature. It was used to refer to what we might call chronic fatigue today, combined with a little attention-getting irritability.
But why am I going on about neurasthenia, you ask? Because I think I caught it from this movie. I notice it particularly in regard to my black cat, Pluto, a fiend from hell. I keep telling him, "Just keep it up, that's all." But does he listen?