Halle Berry is determined to make the Academy sorry it ever awarded her a statuette. How do I know this? By glancing at her post-Oscar filmography -- let's review, shall we? Die Another Day, Gothika, Catwoman, Robots and now we can add to that list Perfect Stranger, a work of extremely contrived and overheated crapulence that all but the most determined masochists will shut off before it reaches its conclusion.

Directed by James Foley (who, like Berry, has a few dogs in his past -- the guy directed Who's That Girl?, after all) from a Todd Komarnicki screenplay, Perfect Stranger is a who-cares whodunit merged with a lurid sex thriller. Tragically, neither the mystery or the heavy panting is done with any kind of wit or originality; instead, viewers are treated to wooden acting from Berry, a creepy but ineffective turn from Giovanni Ribisi and Bruce Willis wandering through the film, picking up a paycheck on his way to watering down the Die Hard franchise. It's a low point for just about everybody on the screen (yes, even you, Gary Dourdan -- and you were in Alien: Resurrection).

Ostensibly a film about the twisted, mysterious world of kinky online chats, Rowena Price (Berry), a star reporter for the New York Po--sorry, Courier, meets up with her friend Grace (Nicki Aycox) late one evening. Grace dumps the story of one Harrison Hill (Willis), an ad exec with a roaming eye and voracious sexual appetite, into her reporter friend's lap. Rowena, fresh from tearing her boss Narron (Richard Portnow, looking sad and confused) a new one over an investigative piece being killed, sees the story as her ticket back to the top. Never mind that Perfect Stranger treats journalism like a plot device, rather than a profession. I haven't seen a newsroom, or a reporter's day-to-day job, portrayed so laughably since Vicki Vale stumbled around Gotham City.

Long story much shorter, Rowena finds herself enmeshed in a cat-and-mouse game with Hill, attempting to draw out the truth about what happened to her friend Grace. Of course, the movie suffers from an overabundance of narrative confusion, refusing to play fair with the audience and essentially revealing at the conclusion the worthlessness of the entire enterprise. There are those who might attempt to defend the neck-snapping audacity of the plot twists as something approaching genius, but no. They're patently stupid, epically asinine in their efforts to make the film seem like one big gotcha; Perfect Stranger should live up to its title, as the viewing public needs to give it the cold shoulder. The only people that will be seeking this one out are those who worked on it.

The Video:

Crisp and immaculate in its 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, Perfect Stranger looks sleek, sexy and luminous -- all of the qualities the screenplay or the actors should've been striving for, but hey, at least you won't spend almost two hours looking at some poorly lit piece of junk. Black levels are inky, colors are well-saturated and there's nary a defect to be spotted.

Like the visuals, the aural presentation of Perfect Stranger is great, if slightly muffled; I found myself occasionally cranking the Dolby Digital 5.1 track to make out of the whispered dialogue, but not often enough to distract from the film. An optional French Dolby Digital 5.1 track is included, as are optional English and French subtitles.

Funny how none of the filmmakers felt like stepping up for a commentary track. The only extra here, aside from trailers for other Sony films, is the featurette "Virtual Lives: The Making of 'Perfect Stranger.'"

There are some films you sift through, hoping to find one tiny, redeemable element that makes an otherwise wretched enterprise worth recommending. Perfect Stranger is not one of those films -- Halle Berry's performance is uniformly craptastic and her support (Bruce Willis, Giovanni Ribisi, et. al.) are right behind her in the phoning-it-in department. Unless you're under house arrest for a few months and desperately need something, anything, to shatter your boredom, let Perfect Stranger molder and rot on the shelves as it so richly deserves to. Skip it.