Black Snake Moan

July 6, 2007

Rated: R Runtime: 115 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

In the modern Deep Deep South, Rae (Christina Ricci) is a trashy white girl who’s got a fire burning down below. It causes her to spontaneously masturbate in fields. It causes her to have sex with everyone in town. It causes her to drink and do drugs and pass out at parties, and wake up playing touch football dressed only in her underwear and football shoulderpads.

Black Snake Moan Lazurus (Samuel Jackson), is a poor farmer and former blues musician whose wife has left him. One morning while taking out his garbage, he finds Rae, passed out, beaten, and in her underwear on his driveway. He undertakes to nurse her back to health, and then, as he says, “I aims to cure you of your wicked ways.” He chains her inside his house so that her nymphomania doesn’t tempt both her and himself.

Well, it’s the best movie ever made about a black man in the Deep South chaining a trashy white girl to a radiator.

That said, I kind of wish I hadn’t seen the trailer, because the first half of the movie is really just the trailer elongated.

Or I wish this had just been another faux trailer in GRINDHOUSE.

I don’t think nymphomania is a recognized medical condition anymore, but even if it was, this is some weird movie nymphomania.

You have to give them points for audacity. But, really, the Grindhouse overtones of the movie are something of a bait-and-switch, it’s really MY FAIR LADY with a little light bondage.

The acting is pretty impressive. Of course, we’ve come to expect nothing less from Samuel Jackson, but Christina Ricci is fearless, and Justin Timberlake actually does a good job.

Look for Kim Richards, the girl from ESCAPE FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN, all grown up.

I think the second half of the movie suffers somewhat because so much of the writing energy went into producing the template for the movie trailer.

At first, I thought Christina Ricci was pretty hot, but then, eventually, my fantasy shifted to wanting to buy and watch her eat a steak dinner, followed by a cheeseburger and a milkshake and a slice of pie. She is a scrawny thing. But you have to give points for a character who would consider Daisy Duke overdressed.

Somewhat bizarrely, she seems to get skinnier when she stops drinking, taking drugs, screwing—-and after she starts eating some of Sam Jackson’s good home cooking.

Or, to put it another way, she’s hot and curvy when she’s mostly naked; paradoxically, when she starts putting on more clothes, she seems too skinny.

Posted by Mack Guffin | Filed Under 3 Stars, Christina Ricci, Comedy, DVD, Drama, Justin Timberlake, Kim Richards, R, Samuel Jackson