The Skeleton Key is a new horror film starring Kate Hudson, John Hurt, and Gena Rowlands. This is your standard haunted house film, implausibly set in New Orleans, where we all know nothing scary has ever happened. I mean, why couldn't they have set the story against the backdrop of someplace truly ethereal, someplace rich with the influence of blended cultures and imbued with centuries-old mythologies of ghosts, voodoo, and vampires? Someplace like Detroit, maybe. But New Orleans? Please. Give us a little credit here.

The plot, such as it is, involves Kate Hudson as a city girl who moves to New Orleans to take care of an invalid stranger. The reason for the move? Well, she discovers early on that she is the heir to the Cherry-Mash family fortune. (That's right, her last name is Cherry-Mash. Caroline Cherry-Mash.) The elder Cherry-Mash, Maximillian (who turns out to be Caroline's biological father), is ailing from an unspecified illness and requires a live-in nurse. Caroline volunteers to fill this role, even though she was a construction worker back in New York and doesn't have the first clue about medicine. As you might expect, odd things begin to happen once Caroline moves into the family mansion. She starts getting mosquito bites, spilling her morning coffee, and losing socks from the laundry. Oh, and there's also some supernatural activity, like blood dripping from the walls and stuff.

The main problem with this film in my opinion is that it's riddled with scenes that bend more toward comedy than skin-crawling horror. For example, there is a scene where Caroline stumbles into a hidden room in the mansion that looks suspiciously like a torture chamber. The horror has just begun to register on her face....and then the disco music starts playing. You see what I mean? Yeah, the music came out of nowhere and should be terrifying, but it's just difficult to make disco music scary. Especially when the next moment a bunch of zombies materialize and start dancing to it. Just imagine if the ghouls from Carnival of Souls were performing dance sequences from Saturday Night Fever, and you'll have some idea what this spectacle was like. Oh, and it might have been more bone-chilling if the zombies had been holding jagged knives, rather than tubes of silly string. I don't know, though. I'm not a director.

In one of the most tangential displays of the estate's otherworldly power, Caroline herself begins to channel jazz fixture Dr. John (who, most mysteriously of all, is still alive). At night, she somnambulates into town and plays local piano clubs, pounding the ivories with ferocity until morning, when she wakes up in the mansion, exhausted, with no memory of where she has been. All she knows is that she smells like smoke and has dried beer all over her clothing.

At one point, a villain remarks that he might have gotten away with his crimes if it hadn't been for those meddling kids. Oh, and not to give anything away, but there is a Blazing Saddles-like ending (even including Dom DeLuise in an uncredited role) that will make you want to call a copyright lawyer on your way home from the theater. Really, this film is trippy enough to be one of those films shown in conjunction with a light show and accompanied by the ingestion of unsafe hallucinogens. Maybe it synchs up to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, who knows? To find out, I'd have to watch it again, and that's something I'm not prepared to do. Not even for science.

P.S. I have not seen The Skeleton Key. This is all fanciful speculation, and fanciful speculation makes me happy.

In Son of the Mask, Jamie Kennedy is an aspiring cartoonist with a problem. His wife has just had a baby with superpowers, and the dog, an adorable Jack Russell terrier, is profoundly jealous of the attention the baby is getting. It doesn't help that the baby, who is able to catapult from room to room like Tarzan in the jungle, manages to get all his acts of wanton destruction blamed on the dog. So the dog heads down to the pub for a pint, and as he is stumbling home in a drunken stupor, he sees a peculiar object mostly covered by newspapers.

I think you all know what that object is. It's the mask. It's that same stupid mask that caused Jim Carrey to act like such a moron in the first film. So the dog puts his face against the mask and transforms into a slobbering cartoon nightmare, complete with elongated ears and a lolling tongue. Just like you'd expect from a preternaturally smart Jack Russell terrier with a 'first child' complex.

But then, the story takes a turn for the bizarre. Jamie Kennedy turns out to be an alien (didn't we see this coming?), and one day the family wakes up to find him in his true form: a little green guy with long ears and a voice that sounds suspiciously like Frank Oz. "An alien I am," he says, and turns the TV to the Lifetime network. His wife shrieks in horror (whether at her husband's unorthodox appearance or the bad melodrama, we don't know) and takes off out the door, never to be seen again. That leaves Yoda Kennedy, his pole-vaulting freak-baby, and the Jack Russell terrier.

Setting aside domestic life, the family decides to go into the business of fighting crime. The superbaby confronts and overpowers the villains with kung-fu; the terrier shoots past at the speed of light, collecting the stolen items; and Yoda Kennedy sketches funny caricatures of the perps to show the police. One of these scenes involves a criminal who is using industrial suction cups to climb an office building. The superbaby, who is standing perpendicular against the building, looks down at the thief and says, "Something wrong with the elevator?" This comedic moment is one of the funniest in the film, and it isn't a bit derivative.

At any rate, their crime-fighting trio is incredibly successful. They attain fame and fortune, but it soon becomes a problem that they never bothered to come up with disguises or alter egos. As a result, the paparazzi begins to hound them constantly. Suberbaby can't go out to get the paper in his housecoat without having his photo taken and plastered all over tabloids everywhere. ("Crime-Fighting Superbaby Too Depressed to Leave the House.") Worse yet, the criminals are staying far away from them.

In the end, Yoda Kennedy takes them all to the Bling-Bling planet in the Dagobah system, which turns out to be a replica of our own Antarctica. The family heads off into the wilderness, past the rocks with the scientifically curious striations, past the city of the Old Ones, and into the heart of the terrifying purple mountains, where they witness horrors too great for the mortal mind.

Overall, I found this movie to be quite a light-hearted romp, although at times it strains credibility. It's a great bit of summer escapism that will have the added bonus of keeping your kids docile (by frightening the bejesus out of them). Add to that the ringing endorsement by Richard Roeper—that smug, undiscriminating Gene Siskel wannabe—and you've got a film you simply must see.

As soon as it goes to video.

White Noise is the Lawrence of Arabia of our time. This is what I've gathered from the television reviews, which tell me the film is brilliant and heart-stopping. (Maybe brilliant in the way that our sun going supernova would be brilliant, and heart-stopping in the same way.) As part of my new tradition, I'm providing you with a fake review of White Noise, which I haven't seen and am not likely to see.

The premise of White Noise is something we can all identify with. That is, our "modern" electronic devices, like cassette tapes I guess, are actually vehicles for the voices of the dead. This is something I've been concerned about for some time, but because of my preoccupation with the recording device placed in my left front tooth by the CIA, I haven't given it the attention it deserves. For instance, I keep getting this weird message on my cell phone every few weeks. There's a crackling sound, and then some automated female voice announces, "good-bye." Is this, perhaps, the voice of a dead lady? Is she trying to get some closure for something? I'm looking to White Noise for some answers.

The movie opens with Batman attending his wife's funeral. His grief is exploited by reporters because his wife was famous or something, and so he ends up becoming a recluse with nothing but electronic devices for company. Now, this could go all David Cronenberg in a hurry, but of course it doesn't, because that would at least be interesting. Instead, we get lots of Batman growing unruly grief whiskers and staring at a snow-covered television screen. Naturally, it doesn't occur to him to call the cable company.

Late one night, a depressed Batman is asleep on the couch. Like usual, he's left the television on to the "snow" channel, and half-eaten tray of pizza rolls sits on the coffee table in front of him. Suddenly, we hear an indistinct whisper coming from the TV. Batman wake up in a hurry, then looks around, confused, trying to orient himself. Just when he is about to drift back to sleep, the whisper returns. "Batman," it says. "Why did you eat all the pizza rolls? They are my favorite." Batman realizes the whisper belongs to his dead famous wife, so they have a little chat about pizza rolls and he goes to bed again. This goes on for several nights, and Batman starts to get his life back together. He's going to his job again and gently rebuffing friends who try to hook him up with their sweet-natured (read: loose) cousins from Memphis.

About a month later, though, Batman hears another voice through the television, and this one isn't talking about pizza rolls. It's talking about brimstone and death and Terry Bradshaw. Then it coughs a little, mumbles something about the blood of the innocent, and fades out. "Oh man," says Batman's wife. "How did that guy get in here?"

"Do you know who that is?" Batman asks.

"Yup. It's Cthulhu. Lives just down the road from me. He's got three or four junkers just rusting on the lawn, you know. Drinking problem, anger management issues, you name it. He's a real bad apple."

"So, he's a dead person, too?"

"Well, no. He's kind of a demon."

"Oh crap," says Batman.

So Batman gets some sage and burns it on top of the television, but the voice comes back anyway. "Why don't you try some rosemary?" Cthulhu asks in his gravelly demon voice. About this time, all the lights in the house start flickering on and off. Batman is sorry he put up all those blacklight posters with psychedelic designs on them because they are making him dizzy. He reaches for his utility belt, but realizes with horror that it is missing.

"Looking for this?" asks Cthulhu, and Batman sees the utility belt floating mid-air over the television.

"Oh crap," Batman says again.

All at once, Cthulhu materializes in front of the television. He looks like a giant squid. A single tentacle is upraised, holding the belt. Mucus is streaming down his body, and his huge, liquid eyes pulse with unbridled evil.

"Whoah!" shouts Batman. "I totally didn't expect that!"

"Ha ha! Noooo-body expects the Spanish Inquisition!" says Cthulhu, affecting a poor British accent.

Suddenly, Batman remembers he has an anti-demon talisman in his pocket, so he whips it out and thrusts it in the demon's face. It's an ancient chess piece—the white Queen—and it was recovered from among the Dead Sea scrolls. Batman's dad threw it at him in a drunken rage one time, and Batman didn't ever bother to return it. So he's holding the chess piece out, shouting "Checkmate!" over and over, and Cthulhu emits a horrible shriek of pain. His squid body begins to vibrate, and the mucus covering his body turns a sickly blackish-purple color.

"Oh crap," says Cthulhu. But then he gets a demonic idea, and starts disrupting the electrical stuff again. The lights are flickering and short-circuiting, causing sparks to shoot all over the place. The radio inexplicably starts blasting Creedence. And Batman has the misfortune to step in a puddle of water that wasn't there before. He gets a severe shock, but not enough to kill him. Still, he is breathing heavily and looking a bit worse for the wear. Then something occurs to him. "Say, I have a question, ole chap."

Just then, Cthulhu presses a button on the utility belt and a grapple hook ejects, hitting him hard in the head. Looking embarrassed, he lets the belt drop. "Er...I will grant you one last question, feeble human," Cthulhu says, rubbing his forehead with a tentacle.

"Why are we fighting?" asks Batman.

"Well...er...that is...I don't know." Cthulhu looks puzzled. He shrugs then (at least as well as an 800-pound squid demon can shrug, that is).

"I have a better idea," says Batman.

They leave for Vegas at once. "We're going to have a killer time," says Cthulhu, adjusting the passenger seat of the Batmobile so that he has enough room for his sprawling tentacles. They both laugh riotously as the car speeds away into the night.

The End.

This is what I imagine the movie Saw is about. Keep in mind, I have no real basis for these speculations, other than what little I've gleaned from the ads.

The Dread Pirate Westley gets kidnapped and locked in a dingy, poorly lit room. Upon regaining consciousness, he discovers that his wrists and ankles are manacled. A note has been left at his feet, and it goes something like this:

"Hi there! You have been selected for an experiment in psychological torture! I've left you a saw so you can cut off one of your limbs and leave. Don't worry about a thing, though. There's an incredibly obvious flaw in my sinister plan that will allow you to escape."

So Westley hangs out awhile, literally, and pretty soon a lovely companion is ushered in. She's a doctor or some such, and she can tell Westley exactly what will happen if he takes the invisible madman up on his devilish deal. "You'll likely bleed to death," she says. They laugh at their situation and then engage in some improbable, flirtatious banter.

Next, they see a trickle of water spill across the floor. The trickle gets wider and soon spreads to cover the length of the floor. Westley and his lady have a problem. Should they saw off a limb apiece and take their freedom now, or remain shackled and drown? Westley and the doctor argue until the water is up to their knees, at which point a bunch of zombies in Ocean Pacific wetsuits come charging in. Their undead groans are kind of muffled by the rebreathers, but they still sound pretty darn menacing. About that time, Westley notices there has been a drain beside his right foot all along! But the drain is blocked by a heavy object, so the doctor has to kind of dive down and move it with her jaw. They are saved! The water ebbs out the drain, and Westley makes a comment on the doctor's wet t-shirt. Next, they focus their attention on the zombies, who have started a glacier-slow siege. The doctor manages to get the saw between her feet and flips it up into Westley's hands. Such suspense! Luckily, he catches the blunt end. He kills all of the zombies but one, and the doctor takes care of that one. She head butts it, knocking it unconscious. Westley gives her an inquisitive look, wondering how she knew this technique would work. "Gross anatomy, stupid," she says.

They kiss.

Next, the sadist who locked them up in the first place makes an appearance. He's angry, and he's played by Gary Oldman.

"How have you defeated my army of wetsuit zombies!?" he demands. "Never has anyone been clever enough to defeat my army of wetsuit zombies!"

He's wielding the biggest chainsaw ever built. Westley can clearly see a label on the side that reads "WARNING: Not FDA-approved!" Westley and the doctor are terrified. They cower in each other's arms while Gary Oldman pontificates about the human condition and what people will do in order to survive.

And now for the deus ex machina. An enormous golden hawk with rainbows in its eyes swoops in THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOW (how did Gary Oldman fail to think of that?!) and grasps Westley and the doctor with its mighty talons. It carries them away to a land of milk and honey, where washed-up actors can find decent gigs and heavy metal musicians never die.

And that's about the size of it.

You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll kiss eight bucks good-bye.