Very Bad Things is pure nastiness masquerading as slick entertainment. Its basic premise is seedy enough on its own; that said premise is cynically treated as twisted humor is damn near inexcusable. Violence and murder in a dramatic context are not objectionable. Some of the greatest films ever made -- Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange, even Pulp Fiction -- center on acts of violence perpetrated by evil souls. But when those dark human depths are exploited as merely one way to make audiences laugh, the material moves beyond the objectionable and into the amoral. We are invited by this movie to derive pleasure from the sick and depraved.

The film is billed as a vicious satire, but of what exactly? There are no clear targets other than, it seems, the audience -- the scenario this film presents is a sick joke that tests humanity's decreasing tolerance level and desperate desire to be entertained. It is an increasing game of dares: "Dare you to try and find the humor in this! And now what about this?!"

The story in a nutshell: Five guys go to Vegas for the most lecherous, debauched bachelor party in the history of the planet. They gamble, they drink, they smoke pot, they snort cocaine, and they order a hooker. After some soft porn-style topless gyrating, one of the guys takes the hooker into the bathroom, engages in rough sex, and accidentally impales her head on a towel hook. Such a heinous situation could make for engrossing dark drama, but the film treats it with such hipster irony that it just feels unclean. Then a security guard shows up, gets an eyeful of the predicament, and is stabbed with a corkscrew. The guys cringe time and again while listening to the man's painful cries for help... until he finally dies. All this action is played for laughs.

Jon Favreau plays the groom-to-be, and acts as the film's sort-of moral center (though using the words "moral center" anywhere in a discussion of this film is a complete joke). Christian Slater plays the group's evil incarnate, and he masterminds the cover-up scheme: cut the bodies into pieces, bury them in the desert, and never tell a soul. Since this is a movie striving to be morbidly humorous, ironic mayhem must ensue -- and it does, in a domino-effect scenario that unfolds much in the same way a standard slasher flick would. Instead of the characters reaching individual resolutions in an organic manner that arises naturally from the film's thematic structure, they merely turn paranoid and are then offed in the most forced, episodic way possible.

The performances are universally good. Slater is fabulous at identifying the fine line between Smug Prick and Vicious Monster and vacillating between them with ease. Favreau is also good as the film's would-be hero, and he has some entertaining interplay with Cameron Diaz as his bride-to-be, who is so concerned with reception tables and place settings that the murderous mayhem surrounding her wedding is merely a roadblock that must be demolished at all costs. Diaz is quite good but is relegated to appearing as a tertiary character for most the film. When she finally is woven into the central fabric of the story, it's way too late to care.

Very Bad Things was the directorial debut of Peter Berg, and how any of this harsh, slam-bang material came from a director of Berg's skill is beyond me. Berg has gone on to make ambitious, interesting films, but the only ambition Very Bad Things harbors is to make the audience cringe. The film obviously views itself as subversive in some way, but it shows no attitude toward the grisly material other than hipster humor and cynical irony. In the aftermath of the murders, when the five men walk through a department store in low-angle slow-motion as they purchase supplies to clean up their mess (to the slick tune of "I Like To Party"), there is no other message than, "This Is Cool." The problem is, it's not cool. It's disturbing. The film isn't subversive, it's perverted.