Swamp Sweat

By RICHARD CORLISS

Is "naughty" still in the pop vocabulary? Can today's moviegoers be--not shocked, we're too savvy and jaded for that--titillated by the spectacle of wicked creatures taking vengeful pleasures? If so, Wild Things may find an audience beyond the one lining up to see Neve Campbell translate her small-screen Sturm und Angst into surly beatnik chic.

We're in Florida--the Atlantic Coast, Gulf Coast and Okefenokee interior seemingly smushed into one town--where the natives are bathed in swamp sweat, among other unguents. Dreamboat high school guidance counselor Matt Dillon is accused of rape by a student, rich-bitch Denise Richards. Did he do it? And did he also do Campbell, a Druidic outcast with nary a kind word for Richards? That is the mystery facing detective Kevin Bacon, who has his own baroque agenda. Fair play forbids further disclosure of the labyrinthine connivery on display or of the detective's dirty secrets. Let's just say he has enough kinks to inspire a new parlor game: Sick Disease of Kevin Bacon.

Ah--pretty people having fun doing rotten things to one another! Old money screwing no money and vice versa. Takes you back to the snazzy sex melodramas of the '50s (Ross Hunter and Otto Preminger, by way of Grace Metalious). Alas, nostalgia ain't what it used to be. The Stephen Peters script is twisty but vacant of character, and John McNaughton's direction is coarse, slapdash, without the saving spark of low art or high camp. If Wild Things deserves a kind word, it would be another adjective that has long been in mothballs. Remember "lurid"?

--By Richard Corliss