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So what's the problem? Lots of movies are totally perverse and are still high-quality flicks -- think Pulp Fiction . And perversion is often what makes a good movie good -- remember how nicely the incest theme worked into the classic Chinatown ?

But putting sick twistedness in a movie is like putting hot sauce in your chili: Both must be added skillfully and in just the right amount, or the final product will make you want to vomit.

A movie should tell a good story -- and if there are gross perversions in the movie, they ought to aid and abet the story, not arrest it. Therein lies the problem with U-Turn. It gets so caught up in its own sickness that it gets lost and dies.

U-Turn is the classic tale of a nice guy who gets stuck in a crummy small town ... sort of. The story goes like this: Bobby, a greasy good-for-nothing (played convincingly by Sean Penn), is driving along through the Arizona desert as innocently as a cat, just taking hallucinogens, making roadkill and generally minding his own business.

All he's trying to do is get to Vegas so he can pay off a $13,000 debt he owes another greasy good-for-nothing (Bobby, like classic protagonists such as Little Red Riding Hood, has a good reason for making haste through the desert -- a bunch of thugs will wrench off one of his fingers with wire clippers for each week that the payment is late).

Unfortunately, Bobby is diverted from his errand of mercy by car trouble. Thoroughly pissed off, and generally behaving like the sleaze that he is, Bobby takes his car to the nearest crummier-than-crummy-repair shop in the tiny, rathole town of Superior, Arizona.

And that's where the real trouble begins.

Filthy, hallucinating and possessed of some gargantuan Hollywood-style sweat rings, Bobby moseys into poverty-stricken Superior.

Right off the bat he runs into a brazen, Native American hussy (she ain't no Pocahantas) named Grace (who, although living in the midst of poverty and despair, clearly works out daily with a personal trainer and somehow is able to order skimpy Calvin Klein sundresses from the Neiman's catalog ... go figure).

Grace (Jennifer Lopez) lures Bobby back to her swell desert love-shack. Just when she and Bobby finally start mugging down, who walks in, but Grace's Dr. Evil-of-a-husband, Jake (Nick Nolte).

Jake socks Bobby, then tells him to get his stinkin' ass the hell out. But all is not what it seems to be: Just minutes later, Jake approaches Bobby and tells him that he will reward Bobby handsomely if he will kill his slutty bitch-wife, Grace.

In a fit of morality, Bobby refuses, but after his $13,000 stash gets blown to smithereens in a nasty convenience-store robbery, he changes his mind and agrees.

When the moment of truth arrives, though, Bobby can't do it. Grace is so darn hot that he opts to have mad sex with her instead.

Grace tells the tearful tale of her life of unending victimhood and explains that Jake is a low-down, dirty, rat bastard. She and Bobby then plot to kill the evil Jake and steal his stash of cash.

I won't tell you what eventually happens to the two star-crossed lovers, but I will tell you this: There ain't no happy-ever-after to th is movie -- just spiraling twist after twist, until the story not only becomes ridiculous but begins to drag.

At the point at which I've left you, there are still four gratuitous and extremely graphic murders to go, not to mention several grizzly flashbacks of murder and finger-hacking, violent fight scenes, scenes of incest and rough sex and countless instances of all-around scandalous, dishonest, villainous and disturbing behavior.

The real kicker in this movie, though, is that in the end there's no conclusion, perverse or otherwise, to be drawn. Gallons of blood are spilled, but it doesn't lead to anything -- it's absolutely gratuitous.

After Pulp Fiction , you might draw the conclusion that cold-blooded murderers are people too.

And Chinatown led you to a Marv Albert conclusion: Sometimes seemingly nice people are total freaks. Raging Bull is a movie that's all about violence, but the violence is framed in terms of the impact it has on a man's life.

A good sick movie uses the shock value of sickness as a means to an end; U-Turn uses sickness as a means to a dead-end nothing.

The movie was so super-saturated with every sort of pointless baseness that any potential meaning was lost.

The acting in the movie is respectable, the cinematography is often captivating and the soundtrack is excellent. But in the end, when the smoke clears, and the bodies stop twitching, all you'll be able to do is turn to your date and say, "Well, that sucked."

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the October 10, 1997 issue.