When actors and actresses reach a certain age, it seems that Hollywood decides it is payback time for all their years of excellent work and they start appearing in roles that are over-the-top shameless burlesques. Let's take a stroll down memory lane. I am sure all of you masochists can recall Al Pacino popping the veins out of his neck for The Devil's Advocate, Jack Nicholson's Tully Marshall tribute in The Shining, and Marlon Brando's Ritz brothers-inspired turn in The Missouri Breaks. On the distaff side, Joan Crawford's female impersonation from Johnny Guitar spoiled her for any "normal" roles forever afterward, while Faye Dunaway's loony one-woman horror show in Mommie Dearest as Joan Crawford transformed her once stellar career into one as a roving mercenary actress in films as disparate and desperate as Dunston Checks In and Cougar Club.

The particular watershed film for once-praised actress Jessica Lange that transformed her from critical darling into a misshapen and overblown combination of a character out a Tennessee Williams and William Castle is Jonathan Darby's daft potboiler Hush, where she waltzes around in jodhpurs as Martha Baring, the head of a large Kentucky horse ranch called Kilronan.

When her upper-crust hunk of a son, Jackson (a bland Johnathon Schaech) arrives at Kilronan with his wide-eyes and void girlfriend Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow) for a down-home Christmas visit, Martha flares her nostrils incestuously, regarding poor Helen as merely a vessel for Jackson's child and not the "right" woman for her little man. So, when she finds Helen in the buff lounging in her son's room instead of her assigned spot in the guest bedroom, Martha leaves nothing to chance and puncture's Helen's diaphragm. The kids leave but Helen finds herself pregnant, and they return to the bowels of Kentucky to wait out the trimesters. Oh no!

Martha immediately takes possession of Jackson and Helen like Hitler invading Poland. A visit by Helen to grandma Alice (Nina Foch), a game old broad who knows where all the bodies are buried, reveals to Helen Martha's evil past and the suspicions surrounding the death of Martha's husband. From then on, Martha turns into a psychopathic harridan. With the aid of powerful horse medication, Martha succeeds in inducing Helen's pregnancy, and the result is a harrowing home-birth sequence that will forever onward give natural birth advocates a bad name. This ordeal finally ignites Helen's anger and after she is able to walk upright again (a mere 24 hours later) she goes hunting for Martha and seeking revenge.

Writer/director Jonathan Darby directs his debut film with a stodgy blandness more appropriate for a Lifetime cable production than a theatrical feature. Darby wimps out in exploring Martha's psychological obsessions through to their much-hinted-at conclusions. To dilute the psychological possibilities even more, Darby renders the Jackson character irrelevant by whisking him away from the picture entirely (if improbably) right before Helen is about to give birth; without the complex problems his character brings to Hush, the film proceeds to play out on a purely comic book level.

But like all fine actors of a certain age with their glories behind them, Lange cannot suppress her instincts and demean herself to a pulp sensibility. The result is that she throws the film entirely out of whack. She is simply too strong for her material, investing this two-dimensional villainess with so much force and technique that it's like Renee Fleming trying to sing "Oops! I Did It Again."