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'The Skeleton Key' is draped in mossy cliches

By BOB TOWNSEND
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The Skeleton Key" has a good cast: Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands and John Hurt. And a pretty good premise: A young hospice worker (Hudson) goes to spooky old mansion way back in Louisiana swamp country to care for a dying man (Hurt) and his eccentric wife (Rowlands) and falls into a nether world of bayou black magic.

Universal Pictures

'The Skeleton Key'

The verdict: More hokum than horror.

Director: Iain Softley
Starring: Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sarsgaard, John Hurt, Joy Bryant
Run time: 104 minutes
Release date: August 12, 2005
Rating: PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, some partial nudity and thematic material.
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Regrettably, though, the Hollywood cliche factory got its mojo working overtime on this one. Director Iain Softley ("K-Pax," "The Wings of the Dove") and writer Ehren Kruger ("The Ring") reprocess way too much hokum (especially from Alan Parker's much more atmospheric if equally absurd "Angel Heart"). And while "The Skeleton Key" may make a subtle, politically correct nod to the differences between "voodoo" (an Afro-Caribbean religion) and "hoodoo" (bad stuff practiced by "two-headed" conjurers), it's still all presented as that weird stuff done by wild-eyed black folk. Worse yet, a flashback to a horrific lynching becomes just another bit of spectacle.

Besides those problems, "The Skeleton Key" never unlocks any really scary doors. Softley's attempts to slowly build a sense of Gothic doom come off as hackneyed — with the obligatory blues tunes, crackling thunderstorms and off-kilter camera angles that frame all sorts of Deep South exotica, from gnarly, mossy oaks to nasty, fleshy things floating in jars. Meanwhile the cast is stuck uttering outlandish lines that seem to have been lifted from the Dr. John songbook: "He hit a straight lick with a crooked stick," Rowlands allows in a flustered mumble.

Hudson isn't half-bad as a do-gooder cutie with a daddy fixation (a la Jodie Foster in "Silence of the Lambs" — or was that "Contact"?). And when it comes time to kick some spell-breaking butt, she's surprisingly up to the task. Rowlands, on the other hand, must have read the script as high camp and thought she could pull off something akin to Betty Davis or Joan Crawford in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" Instead, until the very end, when she's finally released to get sinister and physical, she mostly looks confused. And Hurt is wasted, if absolutely expressive, as a speechless invalid.

Of course, after "The Others," movies of this strain must have a head-scratcher of a twist for a finale. And in that sense, at least, "The Skeleton Key" doesn't disappoint.