THE SKELETON KEY
PG-13, 104 mins.

Pop quiz: What’s the difference between voodoo and hoodoo? Answer: Who cares?

“Who cares?” is, in fact, the correct response to much of what goes down in “The Skeleton Key,” a relentlessly silly bore. Director Iain Softley’s new horror film clumsily explores that first question in painstaking detail, but lacks any of the suspense that might justify its far-too-long running time.

Caroline (Kate Hudson) is a nurse in New Orleans who quits her job at the local hospital because she finds their methods too impersonal. (“The second he died,” she says of a recently deceased patient, “they couldn’t wait to get him out of there” – as if the nurses should have taken the corpse to the zoo.) She gets a job working for Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands), whose invalid husband Ben (John Hurt) is completely paralyzed after a recent stroke. Violet is initially wary of the New Jersey-born Caroline, as she does not trust anyone north of Savannah, but she is convinced to take Caroline on by the family’s shady estate attorney, Luke (Peter Sarsgaard), who is interested in the comely nurse.

Once Caroline is entrusted with a skeleton key that will open every door in the 30-room, three-floor plantation mansion, she develops a cat-killing case of curiosity. A search of the off-limits attic yields cause to suspect that Violet is up to no good; indeed, she is performing some old-fashioned voodoo on her husband. Caroline vows to get to the bottom of this perceived plot, and dives headfirst into the world of black magic.

Because there is nothing remotely frightening to be found in the script – written by Ehren Kruger of “Scream 3” and “Reindeer Games” fame – Mr. Softley relies exclusively on cheap scares like sudden thunder bursts and self-slamming doors, while hoping that the audience doesn’t get wise to some tremendous logical leaps. Alas, this is one of those movies where an elevator works during a power outage and characters flash back to events at which they were not present.

Mr. Kruger is notorious for including twist endings in all his screenplays, and he doesn’t fail to disappoint with a disappointing one here. Ms. Hudson holds her own as the sleuthing nurse, playing against her usual bubbly type, but the other cast members are stuck in ridiculous roles. It seems as though they would have needed some hoodoo of their own to acquit themselves well.

-Edward Goldberger

DEUCE BIGALOW: EUROPEAN GIGOLO
R, 77 mins.

Lord knows, I’ve tried to love Rob Schneider, giving him the benefit of the doubt (and what may well be the best reviews of his life) for “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo” and “The Animal,” two crude comedies that at least managed to elicit a few hearty, if lowbrow, laughs. Up to now, my appreciation of the actor was due in no small measure to his trademark genial loser persona, which seemed to apologize for itself even as it flaunted its silliness.

But do I really need to see, as we do in the sequel, “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo,” a woman with a penis for a nose “sneezing” into someone’s soup and then watch that soup get eaten? Or, worse yet, to imagine that same character’s strange endowment getting stuck in another woman’s tracheotomy hole? (Thankfully, this occurs off-camera.)

Maybe I’m getting too old for this stuff, but the new film – which follows retired male “prosti-dude” Deuce’s (Mr. Schneider) efforts to clear his former pimp’s (Eddie Griffin) name when the manager is accused of murder by the Amsterdam police – feels less like a celebration of anarchic smut than a joyless entry in a gross-out contest designed for the (presumably) stoned teenage male fans of body-part and body-fluid humor.

Sure, I laughed. (What can I say? I’m weak.) But afterward I felt used and dirty in a way I never had before. As he did in the first “Deuce Bigalow” film, Mr. Schneider’s character talks a lot about how his customers want more than a piece of meat. With this latest exercise in cynicism, however, it’s not Deuce’s satisfied clientele, but the audience, that gets the shaft.

-Washington Post