I'm probably going to get a lot of flack from lovers of art films for sending a review of this movie to a page on bad movies. This is supposed to be the kind of film where you go to a cafe with your friends afterwards and discuss the Meaning of Life As Revealed By This Movie until far into the night. You certainly do wind up talking far into the night--trying to figure out what the hell you just saw happen, what it meant if anything, and how this ever acquired a budget that allowed good special effects, but didn't allow a scriptwriter at all.

It begins with a little girl who draws a strange house in her school notebook with a little boy looking out one of the windows. She gets sick and in some kind of delirium starts dreaming that she is in the house and talking to the boy. Then her doctor reveals that there is another patient with the same kind of illness she has, who has lost the ability to walk and has the same name as the little boy in the house. This would be a good setup, if the filmmakers did not then lose all sense of rational plot. Questions I came up with after the movie was over: Did the little boy die? What was the point of the ominous shots of a helicopter circling over the seacoast? Why did the house turn into a lighthouse? Why did the little girl put a picture of her father into the drawing and then scratch out his eyes? Why did about a thousand candles spontaneously light themselves when the father tried to go into the house? What was the thing on the back wall of the house that looked like a microwave and spontaneously emitted bursts of static at weird intervals? How did the boy save the girl from some unspecified monstrosity when he couldn't even walk? What was the point of the unspecified monstrosity? Why did flaming cracks in the ground appear when it showed up? Why was the little girl's reaction on learning the little boy couldn't walk to get him a bicycle (really)?

My mother and I, after seeing the film three times on video, came up with equally valid explanations that accounted for everything in the movie. If the explanations had had anything whatsoever to do with each other, we would have been set, and I wouldn't be writing this review.

This isn't a funny movie, until you're thinking about it afterwards. They had a real budget, so it's eye candy, and it's quite well acted. See it, and become eternally puzzled.

Turkey Rating: Two.

Best line: "I didn't mean to erase my father."

Things that make you go "Huh?": The bicycle.