Less than an hour away from Buffalo, some of the most horrifying killings in memory took place in the late 1980s, as Saint Catherines resident Paul Bernardo raped, tortured and killed at least three young women. If you’re from here you certainly remember reports of the trial in the early 1990s, and the outrage that many Canadians felt when Bernardo’s wife, Karla Homolka, was sentenced to only 12 years, despite evidence that she participated fully in the killings—including that of her own teenaged sister. Canadians were outraged again in 2005 when an American movie about Bernardo and Homolka was announced, to be released at just about the same time that Homolka was to be released. (The film was scheduled to be shown that year at the Monteral World Film Festival but pulled due to pressure from a commercial sponsor, an unfortunate precedent.)

Imagine Samuel L. Jackson quoting passages from the Bible and you immediately think of Pulp Fiction. That’s not the only point of comparison that Black Snake Moan has to the work of Quentin Tarantino, just the most obvious one. Writer-director Craig Brewer, who came to prominence in 2005 with the surprise hit Hustle & Flow, once again offers a story set in his home state of Tennessee. Jackson plays the rather obviously named Lazarus, an ex-blues musician who has turned to farming. When his wife leaves him under the worst possible circumstances (and with the worst possible words), he is cast into a deep pit of despair. He finds a badly beaten young woman outside his house one day and takes her in to care for her. (In an area like his, a black man taking a bruised and unconscious white girl to the police is asking for more trouble than a peaceable man can handle.) Making enquiries, he learns that Rae (Christina Ricci) is the local roundheels, driven to uncontrollable nymphomania by an abused childhood and the loss of her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) to the military. Lazarus decides that after her body heals he’s going to help heal her soul as well, and if she proves disinterested in his efforts when she recovers consciousness, well, that’s what chains are for. If you’ve seen the tongue-in-cheek lurid poster for the film, you’ll realize that the plot I’ve just described is pretty much the opposite of what that image implies. Like Tarantino, Brewer wants to have his cake and eat it too, parodying his melodramatic material just enough to make it acceptable to a jaded audience of the new millennium. But his balance is uneven, and it’s difficult to know when you’re laughing with this film and when you’re laughing at it. It’s hard enough to take a plot about hysterical nymphomania seriously, more so with the way the camera perpetually drools over Ricci’s nearly (and sometimes wholly) naked body. The title comes from a song by Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Black Snake Moan is at its best whenever there is music, either as performed by the characters (a mesmerizing scene when Lazarus plays an electric blues for Rae during a fierce thunderstorm) or in the well-chosen soundtrack of gutbucket blues performances.