Many conclusions can be reached after watching Black Snake Moan, director Craig Brewer's lurid follow- up to Hustle & Flow.

If you don't buy into the movie - and many won't - you could decide that the sophomore jinx, which tends to turn second movies into raging disappointments, has struck Brewer hard.

You also might conclude that Samuel L. Jackson should stick to talking, not singing.

And you additionally could reach a verdict on Christina Ricci's courage as an actress. You might say she'll try just about anything. Ricci gives the kind of fearless performance that must have required her to overcome every last ounce of inhibition.

But whatever you conclude about Black Snake Moan - and opinions are bound to diverge - you'll have to admit that the movie is as vivid as Southern heat, the kind in which a woman like Ricci's Rae wiggles into skintight short-shorts and struts through dusty streets, making a statement with every inch of her flesh.

Like Rae, Brewer's movie comes on strong, but that doesn't mean it's any good. Because Black Snake Moan asks its characters to confront demons involving sin and sex, it stomps into an area that lives between exploitative movie trash and Southern Gothic literature. It's bold without being especially believable.

Ricci, who appears topless or in her underwear throughout most of the movie, plays Rae, a defiant Southern woman who can't seem to get enough sex. When her boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) heads off for National Guard service, Rae immediately seeks sexual solace from a black drug dealer (David Banner).

If Rae goes without sex for long, she begins to shake and shiver. For her, sex functions like a drug, warding off anxiety-producing memories of childhood abuse. It also gives her a sense of power. Credit Ricci with packing all of Rae's emotional turbulence into one fiery package.

How's a movie to deal with so much unleashed female sexuality?

After Rae is beaten and abandoned by her boyfriend's best pal, Jackson's Lazarus - a blues singer- turned-farmer - discovers her lying in a road near his home. He brings her into his house. To make Rae stay put, he chains her to a radiator. Metaphoric intentions begin to rattle louder than those chains.

As it turns out, Lazarus wants to help Rae, to settle her down, to "cure" her. He's also battling his own demons. He confuses her sexual wildness with the rebellious assertions of the wife who recently left him to take up with his brother.

With a character named Lazarus, it's safe to say that we're going to be watching a movie about some kind of rebirth and redemption. Should Lazarus pick up his guitar and play those devil blues? Can a man be good and still frequent a nightclub?

With a chained-up white woman in his house, Lazarus also is poised for trouble. His longtime preacher friend (nicely played by John Cothran Jr.) becomes involved. Lazarus' single-minded devotion to his task sets back a budding relationship with a local pharmacist (S. Epatha Merkerson).

Black Snake Moan, which features a lot of music, struck me as so much Southern-fried hooey, particularly in the way it finally resolves its raw and elemental passions. It's not giving away too much to tell you that one of the movie's pivotal transformations arrives awfully abruptly.

En route to its finale, Black Snake Moan muddies plenty of thematic water, splashing its way through issues involving sex, race, betrayal and guilt. It spends three-quarters of the movie smacking us upside the head and then tries to warm our hearts.

I guess it all fits Brewer's style. His movie can be so emphatic that it sometimes feels as if it's made up entirely of exclamation points. For me, one of them ultimately belongs at the end of the word ridiculous, as in too far over the top.

Unchained

Looking for controversy? Start with the movie's poster, which manages to capture all of Black Snake Moan's hot-button issues (the South, bondage, race relations) in one shot. How the film's principals counter the questions and criticism:

• Writer-director Craig Brewer: "This is not necessarily a realistic portrayal of the days and lives of Southerners. I assure you, we do not chain our women, . . . not to my knowledge, anyway."

• Star Samuel L. Jackson: "Art should make you nervous. . . . It is a lurid story (that) just so happens to have a redemptive element in the back of it."

• Star Christina Ricci: "Rae is such an honest depiction of a woman who suffered horrible sexual abuse as a child and - as what unfortunately so often happens to sexually abused girls - grows up to be promiscuous . . . and self-destructive."