Between Your Legs, as its provocative title indicates, may suck you in. But eventually it will spit you out.

The oddball setup offers much promise, as our main characters find themselves meeting at a sex addicts' support group. He (Javier Bardem) is a phone sex junkie and screenwriter. She (Victoria Abril, who may very well be a sex addict in real life if her other movies are any guide) is a basic slut and a radio talk show producer. Together they have a love-hate-screw relationship that gets all the stranger when Abril's husband (a cop) discovers a dead body in the trunk of a car where our heroes once did the nasty. Add to that, someone has been taping Bardem's phone sexcapades -- and selling them as audio porn!

Holy crap!

This story starts off with a megabang of cryptic characters and engaging obsessions, but once the film tries to build cred as a thriller it all falls apart. How many suicides of minor characters will it take to make you lose interest? How much splattered blood will it take to make you forget about Bardem and Abril altogether? The convolutions end up coming at you so rapid-fire that the movie's impossible to make any sense out of at all.

For its first hour, Between Your Legs is a rare gem from Spain. For its last hour, it's a rare piece of junk that only Joe Eszterhas could enjoy. Listen closely, and you can hear him jotting notes from it for his next masterwork.

Aka Entre las piernas.