BOXING HELENA

BOXING HELENA (Directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch. Starring Julian Sands, Sherilyn Fenn, Bill Paxton)

Already notorious as the film that cost Kim Basinger an arm and a leg, Boxing Helena demonstrates that the now bankrupt actress has more sense than money. Pulling out of this dreadful nonsense is probably the smartest career move she ever made.

Jennifer Chambers Lynch claims nepotism had nothing to do with her becoming the youngest female film-maker, but her backers must have been hoping she would prove to be a true daughter of her father. Basinger was replaced in the title role by David Lynch stalwart Sherilyn Fenn and the film's premise reeks of Lynchian perversity: a surgeon, rejected in love, amputates the limbs of his object of desire and keeps her locked up in a box for his own gratification.

As a one liner it sounds like a potentially great, if grotesque, study in obsession and sexual politics but Lynch Jnr appears to have little to add to that one line. She barely fleshes out this tale, filling up acres of screen time with MTV style musical passages, straining towards poetry perhaps but leaning to soft porn. And if she was so intent on emerging from the shadow of her father, she should have avoided the stylistic borrowings; blurring slow motion, white light flashes and over-amplified sounds to name only the most obvious. She emulates the style, but it only serves to point up the lack of content.

The plot of Boxing Helena is as bloodless as the amputation. There is an obvious metaphor - of men trying to control women by rendering them harmless (or armless) - but it appears to be sabotaged by the softening of the bitchy Helena and her apparent growing affection for her captor. And as the mad doctor, Julian Sands' motivation is as dodgy as his camp acting: all cod Freudian mother-fixation. By the climax, having boxed herself into a corner, Lynch resolves everything with the oldest, hoariest and frankly worst of movie cop-outs, effectively sabotaging whatever the hell she might have been trying to say in the first place.

Bad acting, bad writing and bad ideas all render Boxing Helena laughable, if not much fun. So bad it's bad. Basinger was probably giggling all the way to the bank.