Warning: Rated R (strong sexual content, language, some violence and drug use)

Black Snake Moan is lurid, Southern-fried pulp fiction - a film sweaty with sex, feverish with religious passion. Set in the familiar but almost-lost rural South of seedy juke joints, in-the-spirit churches and dirt farms, at its heart it is a morality play about the eternal struggle between the flesh and the Holy Spirit.

Director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) is trying to visualize the blues, the lowdown, dirty blues, with men battling temptation and weakness in the form of a woman who has "the itch." He's made a film that is laughably archaic and old fashioned, shot-through with the raunchy candor of modern-day indie cinema. It's a cartoonish "Baby Doll," with a suggestive blues song title, about sex, guilt and redemption.

"Black Snake" is also a rather flimsy parable unable to support the weight of Brewer's ambition.

Christina Ricci is Rae, a redneck vamp who has found her one, true love, and he is shipping off into the Army. He's barely hopped on the bus before she's taken a few pulls off a vodka bottle, lifted her Confederate flag T-shirt and tossed aside her cut-off jeans-shorts for the first man to whistle in her direction.