"The Box"

You may recall cash-strapped Demi Moore had to sleep with Robert Redford to get a million dollars in "Indecent Proposal." But that was in 1993. Back in 1976, things were apparently much easier: All schoolteacher Cameron Diaz has to do in "The Box" is press a button.

That's the attention-grabbing hook of writer-director Richard Kelly's chiller, very loosely based on Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button." Norma Lewis (Diaz) and her husband, Arthur (James Marsden), an aspiring astronaut, are a Virginia couple with major money worries. So the siren song of temptation is mighty hard to resist when Arlington James Steward (Frank Langella) drops a gift on their doorstep. It's an innocent-looking wooden box with a red button attached to it. Steward's instructions: Press the button within 24 hours and you'll get a million dollars -- but you'll also be responsible for the death of a stranger somewhere in the world. It might be someone's baby, Arthur reasons. Or it could be someone who's already on Death Row, Norma counters.

The offer is peculiar and the messenger is downright creepy: Steward lost a large chunk of the left side of his face recently. Still, Norma (who has a deformed foot of her own) gives the matter serious consideration.

In its first 40 minutes, "The Box" lays the groundwork for a provocative shocker, and Kelly (who made the cult favorite "Donnie Darko" and the largely reviled "Southland Tales") has a great deal of fun recalling the cheesy charm of the Ford Administration, when "What's Happening" and "Alice" were on TV, Bicentennial flags were everywhere and unlucky kids carried lunchboxes promoting "The Exciting World of Metrics." Diaz and Marsden bravely wear the clingy polyester fashions of the day, and the ghastly, pseudo-psychedelic wallpaper in the Lewis' kitchen all but begs for co-star status.

Unfortunately, Kelly eventually loses his balance and the movie abruptly stops building suspense, opting instead for weird goings-on and half-hearted paranoid fantasies that might have been at least partially inspired by "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." If the scenario sounds familiar, it might be because you saw the 1980s "Twilight Zone" episode that was also based on the Matheson tale. It had the major advantage of being one-fourth as long as Kelly's version.

The last hour of "The Box" sends Norma and Arthur on a one-way trip into Wackyland, where they face legions of silent stalkers, outdoor motel swimming pools that are still open in mid-December and neighbors who seem uncommonly prone to nosebleeds. (There are as many bloody noses in "The Box" as there are discussions about marriages in a Jane Austen novel.)

After a certain point, it all seems like strangeness for the sake of strangeness. Characters come and go, with no explanation. Ideas are brought up and almost immediately dismissed. Logic and coherence evaporate while Kelly dithers over whether he's making a psychological shocker or an off-the-wall dark comedy: When Steward tells an anguished mother and father their blind and deaf child will "never hear your voices or see your faces again," you may half-expect him to add, "but on the positive side, he's halfway to becoming a Pinball Wizard."

The slapdash feel of the last half of the film indicates that Kelly might have vainly hoped he could piece together a picture in the editing room. Warner Bros. couldn't guess what he was up to, either, which explains why the movie is being unceremoniously dumped into theaters nearly two years after it finished shooting.

With such overcooked lines as "whatever happens to you from this point on will have greater consequences than you can possibly fathom," "The Box" seems to be inviting laughter, but Kelly obviously didn't let Diaz and Marsden in on the joke: They steadfastly march through scene after scene with straight, troubled faces. Meanwhile audiences, exhausted from trying to decide between gasping and giggling, can only greet each new plot twist with rolling eyes. When "The Box" comes to DVD, it won't be a surprise if many viewers press the button marked "eject" long before the film's unsatisifying conclusion.