If I were you I’d copy and paste the names of all the Metacritic reviewers who’ve given Park Chan-wook‘s Stoker a 70% or better. Then I’d do the same with the Rotten Tomatoes reviewers who gave it a thumbs-up. And then arrange their last names alphabetically and print the list and tape it to your refrigerator door or…whatever, paste it on your Notes app on your iPhone.

Because anyone who gives any kind of pass to Stoker is either smoking something or eating something they shouldn’t or I-don’t-know-what. Either they have a liking for the kind of oppressively flamboyant style that screams “oppressively flamboyant style!”, or they’ve decided that directors who present characters who wallow in cruel or deeply perverse behavior are themselves deliciously perverse (and that critics who get and/or celebrate this are extra-hip), and that anyone who directs by way of Brian DePalma-on-steroids has to be cool because…well, because he/she has lots of nerve! That or the critic is overly liberal or charitable. Either way I would henceforth regard them askance.

If by clapping my hands three times I could somehow erase this kind of lunatic, high-style, absurdly over-telegraphed approach to murder-and-revenge melodramas from the face of the earth and then send it to hell and into a pit of snarling, salivating dogs, I would clap my hands three times. If you’re any kind of fan of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Shadow of a Doubt, or if you have the vaguest respect for the basic premise (perverse Uncle Charlie and his teenaged admiring niece who “gets” Charlie on a certain level) and what a clever, resourceful writer and director could potentially do with it, you’ll find it damn hard not to be appalled by Stoker.

I love Andrew O’Hehir‘s line about it being “The Addams Family meets The Paperboy.”