TWISTED

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS BUT YOU REALLY HAVE SEEN IT ALL BEFORE

There's something to be said for a big name Serious Director turning his hand to what is essentially B-movie trash. It's rather like finding out that Transformers 3 is going to be helmed by the Coen Brothers. It's entirely possible that Philip Kaufman, who usually directs proper films like The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being or Henry And June, just had some household bills to pay, but it's nevertheless unusual to see his name on a belated entry in the world of erotic thrillers.

Because essentially Twisted is a throwback to the topshelfers of the early 90s: the likes of Animal Instincts and Night Rhythms, except that it rather cops out by inverting the 70-30 ratio of sex to plot, and ultimately has so little on-screen bonk action that it gets away with a 15 certificate (which it would have got for strong language anyway) and having big name stars like Andy Garcia, Ashley Judd and Samuel L Jackson in it: people who aren't going to do the kind of irrelevant nude scenes you find in the dozens of Gregory Hippolyte movies that came out after Basic Instinct and Body Of Evidence. Recently promoted to Homicide, Judd spends her off-duty hours alternately drinking to blackout and picking up strangers in a bar for meaningless casual sex. Immediately the corpses start piling up, with cigarette burns on the hands, and they're all Judd's one-night stands.

Who could it be? Judd's new homicide partner Garcia? The ex-boyfriend who won't accept the relationship is over? It might even be her psychiatrist (David Strathairn). And does it have anything to do with her father's suicide? This is incredibly silly stuff and while it does drag out the old comparison that a bloke who beds a different woman every night is a Real Man while a woman who beds a different man every night is a Cheap Slut, it's pretty empty and the killer's identity is fairly unbelievable. Tosh, tolerable at best.

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