Sometimes you see a movie that makes you ask "What the fuck did I just see?" Since horror films can depend so heavily on dream logic, very often the best horror films make you ask that very question. At the end of Ligeia, that very question popped up in my mind, but I'm not sure if it was a sign that it was a great horror movie.

For starters, I'm not really sure if it is even a horror movie. It certainly could be, since it is based (oh so very loosely) on a story by Edgar Allan Poe and there are a couple of murders and a ghost that figure into the storyline. But the main thrust of the movie is sex (so the pun is, I guess, intended) and, I suppose, what the obsession with it can do to the mind.

And like any good sex film should, it opens as a couple is having sex. They are Kieran and Rowena, whose name is one of the nods to the original Poe story. In that tale, the narrator is obsessed with Ligeia, a woman he once loved and has since passed on from this mortal coil, and because he is so obsessed, he feels a certain level of contempt for his new wife, Rowena.

That much of the story is present here. This is by no means a happy marriage. The first character we meet is Rowena, and in the first scene in which we spend any time with her, she's setting up a booty call with her old boyfriend Bobby since her husband isn't expected to be home for several hours.

Rowena gets the shock of her life when Bobby shows up, however. While he sounded male over the phone, when Bobby shows up he is most definitely a female (and a nice looking one, at that). It seems both of them have had some big changes in their lives since last seeing each other.

While this is happening, Kieran is busy himself -- claiming to be working late at the office, he's actually invoved in a weird S & M affair with a woman named Kelly (when we first see them together he is wearing playboy bunny ears and clothespins on his nipples and she is wearing a leather catsuit with a halloween mask and holding a whip).

However, Bobby manages to get Rowena over her initial hesitance over his/her new gender and they begin an affair.

And this is the first weak spot of the story. Since it is painfully obvious that neither Kieran nor Rowena really cares about the other, I found myself wondering why one of them hasn't packed up and moved out already. They don't seem to be particularly affluent, so it couldn't be lifestyle addiction. They don't have kids, so there's no reason to stick around there, either. And since they both seem to enjoy such different sexual outlets than the other one can offer, there's no physical reason to stay, except that is conveniently links all the characters together in the plot.

The next evening, Kieran and Rowena have Kelly and her husband over for dinner. After some saucy talk about bondage clubs and sex, Kelly and her husband screw on the couch and Rowena suggests to Kieran that they swap partners, which Kieran is all too happy about. Their "swinging" experiment goes awry, however, when Rowena decides to bite an ear off Kelly's husband. (In hindsight, I guess she does this because she's posessed by the ghost of Ligeia, but the movie doesn't seem to interested in explaining this.)

After Kelly drops her husband off at the hospital, she calls up Kieran and invites him over for sex, so Kieran leaves Rowena at home in bed while he goes off hit that shit some more. Kieran and Kelly decide, James M. Cain style, that the best thing for their relationship is to kill her husband (you'd think they'd realize how easy it is to get a divorce these days, but then you wouldn't have much of a body count for what is, after all, supposed to be a horror movie).

So right after hubby arrives home from the hospital, Kieran jumps him from behind and stabs him in the back several times. Sucks to be him, I guess.

Now Kelly and Kieran have to convince the cops that her husband was killed as part of a break-in gone awry, and just to make sure that things don't go too smoothly for ol' Kier his wife decides to move Bobby in to their apartment and sets up the sleeping arrangements so Kieran is stuck on the couch while she and Bobby share the bed.

Rowena is trying to convince Bobby that what he/she needs to do is go back to being a he, and Kelly tries to convince Kieran that they need to have a completely unobstructed relationship and the only way to do that is to kill off Rowena.

You think you've got love troubles?

As I said, this movie had me asking WTF? several times after it was all over. I listened to the commentary (by writer/director Dave Lawler, actress Bronwyn Knos, who plays Rowena, and editor Scott Malley) hoping it would provide some clues to the convoluted story. Sadly, it didn't -- although it does provide helpful hints on how to get rid of bed bugs if your apartment is infested with them, and you discover that director Lawler is quite an ass afficianado (but, hey, aren't we all?).

The trailer included on the dvd offers up some insight, however, because it asks the same questions I was asking after it was all over -- is this a porno movie? Is it scary? Is it art? Is it pretentious wankery? So, apparently, neither the distributors nor the filmmakers can make heads or tails of this movie, either.

If it's a horror movie, it's not scary, it's not really all that gory, although it does have its own weird kind of atmosphere. And it definitely leaves you feeling disoriented.

If it's a porno, it's pretty tame and most of the sex scenes are over with pretty quickly. (The movie is only 75 minutes long.) However, I must say, it carries over one staple of porn films -- the women are all very attractive and the one guy you see naked is kind of flabby and hairy. Not that I'm complaining about this, mind you (although it would definitely add to the horror element if it were the other way around).

However, it's definitely unlike anything else I've seen recently, and that has to count for something.