After witnessing this amateurish rubbish, which has the pretensions to set up thematic links with Dostoyevsky, I felt my brain had suffered an injection of Novocaine.
Its sole interest, apart from the repulsiveness of every ill-written and worse-acted role in it, consists in seeing how eerily it allegedly predated certain characters and sequences in American Beauty - whose success, of course, buried it in deserved obscurity a year or so ago.
Ellen Barkin plays a tramp-ish wife in American suburbia who dates a sleazy bartender (Jeffrey Wright) while her obese second husband (Michael Ironside) sucks beer at home, surfs TV and then, at a loose end, rapes his step-daughter.
This sluttish college cheerleader (Monica Keena) puts a thick-brained jock (James DeBello) up to murdering her step-dad, though she hits him first in the belly with a knife, then finishes the job round the back with an electric carving knife last heard being used (ominously) on the family joint. All this is observed by a girlish-faced voyeur (Vincent Kartheiser) who plays noctural Peeping Tom and neighbourhood paparazzo.
The morality of the piece is beyond perception, and, since it's so incoherent anyhow, interest; but it certainly does suggest the script of American Beauty was doing the rounds.
The director is a pop-video hand, Rob Schmidt, and the producer, Christine Vachon, described in the production notes as an uberindie - figure it out yourself - is the same one who won "the Fameline Award for Outstanding Achievement in Lesbian and Gay Media and ... was honoured with the Muse Award for Outstanding Vision and Achievement by New York Women in Film and Television."
Which explains a lot.
Crime + Punishment In Suburbia
Cert: cert12
