DEM CREAKY OLD BONES

REVIEWED - THE SKELETON KEY: I WONDER what the citizens of New Orleans will make of this fruity gumbo of shrunken heads, mad-eyed crones and rocking chairs that rock themselves.

If Iain Softley's outlandish horror film is to be believed, that Louisiana city still simmers in the heat of a thousand swampy cliches. How long will it be before Kate Hudson, a Yankee hospice worker, takes herself off to a jazz club? About five minutes or so. How often will Mr Softley's second unit fly its helicopter across steaming bayous towards crumbling mansions? Take those sequences out and the film barely qualifies as a feature.

Tales this pulpy are best told by disciplined, unpretentious directors working to small budgets. Jacques Tourneur's great B-movie I Walked with a Zombie, made for the cost of Kate's pot pourri, used a similar plot - a young nurse cares for a mute invalid amid a people in thrall to tribal religion - to generate a potent unease entirely absent from Softley's lush travelogue.

Mind you, The Skeleton Key contains so many rotten old horror chestnuts it would surely frustrate the talents of even the most dedicated of exploitation hacks. Hudson answers an advertisement in a paper requesting a live-in nurse. After leading the second unit in and out of a few more swamps, she makes her way to a house owned by Gena Rowlands's ageing southern belle. The old lady's brother, a stroke victim, is played by John Hurt, who barely moves or speaks throughout and can rarely have got so much money for so little old rope.

Rowlands gives Hudson a skeleton key, warning her that it will not open the door in the attic. Naturally she eventually breaks into this mysterious alcove and discovers various hoodoo trinkets, gramophone records of weird chanting and a number of creepy photographs. And so it goes on.

After the first half-hour of relentless foreshadowing - why are there no mirrors in the house? - you begin to suspect that no denouement short of global annihilation will seem satisfactory. To be fair, the film almost frustrates those expectations with a final twist outrageous enough to give hokum a good name. But it's still not worth the wait.