There's nothing unpleasantly wrong with Lost Junction. It's brightly lit, cleanly composed, appealingly cast, and means no harm at all--which, if nothing else, keeps you from feeling too much ill will towards the participants. Alas, it's also completely unremarkable in every other particular. Neither the screenplay's bag of Southern Gothic/neo-noir/Afterschool Special clichés nor the non-performance of director Peter Masterson make any serious dent on your consciousness, predicated as they are in delivering the time-honoured goods with a minimum of personal investment. That the players satisfied their contractual obligations will no doubt warm hearts in the studio, but the finished project barely registers as eyewash and should be consigned to oblivion in about five minutes.

Jimmy McGee (Billy Burke) is fixing his stalled car outside the town of Lost Junction when he decides to hitch a ride with passing motorist Missy Lofton (Neve Campbell). Lofton is one of those enigmatic movie women with a past, something she proves by a) attaching herself to Jimmy for no reason, and b) using him as a bank "expert" upon cleaning out her joint account. In reality, she's keeping the body of her dead husband in the trunk of her vintage powder-blue ride, but that's neither here nor there: by the time Jimmy is apprised of the situation, he's hopelessly in love and in it for the duration. Of course, Missy is not explaining much. She's got to get to New Orleans to meet up with a sort-of accomplice and deal with some personal matters--the dead husband married her after arranging an abortion in desperate circumstances. But who is the accomplice? And what is her secret?

Regrettably, that secret is not one of cinema's pressing questions. Though set in the South, the film seems to have been written by a Northerner who heard of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams as a rumour: Jeff Cole's script has all of the chestnuts--incest, murder, and dark, dark secrets--with none of the introspection that marks the best works of the genre. Thus the Southern setting is used as a playground for timid erotic tension, leading to an even worse sin: the male lead's patronization of a wounded-soul female. Despite Cole's strenuous attempts to convince us that he sympathizes with perennial victim Missy, she's really there to provide a problem for sensitive Jimmy to solve. Couple this with Jimmy's truly feeble backstory (he accidentally paralyzed a childhood friend (and returns to apologize, prompting the mobilization of wheelchair-bound Jake Busey as a fifth wheel)) and you've got a series of old bits that ought to be too tired to make it as far as the page.

While the shop-worn business of Southern Gothic can still compel in the hands of a stylish (if unscrupulous) director, Masterson is not up to the task. His approach is to take everything at face value and read nothing into it, lighting it all in a high-key style that keeps everything in focus and recognizable as itself--a strange approach for a film where "nothing is as it seems" and objects such as a pot of cash and that classic ride have great significance. In fact, the tone of Lost Junction is pretty sunny as sordid details roll out and bodies decompose in peoples' trunks; one wonders if Masterson showed up on set without reading the script and patiently waited for the actors to say their lines. Though the film isn't ugly or haphazard, it is totally nondescript, completely failing to size up the thematic core of the material. I never thought I'd say this, but where's Alan Parker when you really need him?

MGM presents Lost Junction on DVD in a slightly-oversaturated 1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced transfer that otherwise looks just fine. Detail is remarkable considering the stickiness of the colours. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, meanwhile, sounds adequately full, with the surrounds receiving special attention from the music. The film's trailer, trailers for Walking Tall (2004), Saved!, Intermission, Wicker Park, and Unspeakable, and some MGM propaganda round out the platter.-Travis Hoover