The Skeleton Key is a new horror film starring Kate Hudson, John Hurt, and Gena Rowlands. This is your standard haunted house film, implausibly set in New Orleans, where we all know nothing scary has ever happened. I mean, why couldn't they have set the story against the backdrop of someplace truly ethereal, someplace rich with the influence of blended cultures and imbued with centuries-old mythologies of ghosts, voodoo, and vampires? Someplace like Detroit, maybe. But New Orleans? Please. Give us a little credit here.

The plot, such as it is, involves Kate Hudson as a city girl who moves to New Orleans to take care of an invalid stranger. The reason for the move? Well, she discovers early on that she is the heir to the Cherry-Mash family fortune. (That's right, her last name is Cherry-Mash. Caroline Cherry-Mash.) The elder Cherry-Mash, Maximillian (who turns out to be Caroline's biological father), is ailing from an unspecified illness and requires a live-in nurse. Caroline volunteers to fill this role, even though she was a construction worker back in New York and doesn't have the first clue about medicine. As you might expect, odd things begin to happen once Caroline moves into the family mansion. She starts getting mosquito bites, spilling her morning coffee, and losing socks from the laundry. Oh, and there's also some supernatural activity, like blood dripping from the walls and stuff.

The main problem with this film in my opinion is that it's riddled with scenes that bend more toward comedy than skin-crawling horror. For example, there is a scene where Caroline stumbles into a hidden room in the mansion that looks suspiciously like a torture chamber. The horror has just begun to register on her face....and then the disco music starts playing. You see what I mean? Yeah, the music came out of nowhere and should be terrifying, but it's just difficult to make disco music scary. Especially when the next moment a bunch of zombies materialize and start dancing to it. Just imagine if the ghouls from Carnival of Souls were performing dance sequences from Saturday Night Fever, and you'll have some idea what this spectacle was like. Oh, and it might have been more bone-chilling if the zombies had been holding jagged knives, rather than tubes of silly string. I don't know, though. I'm not a director.

In one of the most tangential displays of the estate's otherworldly power, Caroline herself begins to channel jazz fixture Dr. John (who, most mysteriously of all, is still alive). At night, she somnambulates into town and plays local piano clubs, pounding the ivories with ferocity until morning, when she wakes up in the mansion, exhausted, with no memory of where she has been. All she knows is that she smells like smoke and has dried beer all over her clothing.

At one point, a villain remarks that he might have gotten away with his crimes if it hadn't been for those meddling kids. Oh, and not to give anything away, but there is a Blazing Saddles-like ending (even including Dom DeLuise in an uncredited role) that will make you want to call a copyright lawyer on your way home from the theater. Really, this film is trippy enough to be one of those films shown in conjunction with a light show and accompanied by the ingestion of unsafe hallucinogens. Maybe it synchs up to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, who knows? To find out, I'd have to watch it again, and that's something I'm not prepared to do. Not even for science.

P.S. I have not seen The Skeleton Key. This is all fanciful speculation, and fanciful speculation makes me happy.