A grim-and-grimmer urban horror story, from a novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., about four drug dependents en route (in a final flurry of cross-cutting) to neatly synchronized rack and ruin. The downward spiral of your dime-a-dozen junkie needs more than new extremes of physical disgustingness -- the gangrene, the two-way dildo -- to revitalize it as a screen subject. (More, too, than old extremes: the vomit.) However, the diet-pill habit of the mother of one of the red-cent junkies -- added on to her raging TV addiction -- opens up a new avenue of investigation, with compelling new details, including most prominently a rumbling refrigerator such as might have been imagined by Edgar Allan Poe. (Ellen Burstyn's all-stops-out performance is compelling as well.) The title correctly forecasts a streak of mawkishness, although that, along with the hammering horror, is a little offset, even undermined, by the gimmick-happy direction of Darren Aronofsky, the Pi man, now equipped with tenfold resources and determined to tap them to the limit. The split screens, the fast-motion, the fisheye lens, the rhythmical editing riffs, the just-kidding fantasies and hallucinations, the Spike Lee-style tracking shots behind or in front of floating zombies -- all this (and more) injects a playfulness that slightly lightens, without quite altering, the mood. Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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