Swiss-born director Marc Forster's erratic foray into Southern Gothic might not score any points in the ongoing debate over capital punishment, but it will certainly advance the career of Halle Berry. Not since she played a crackhead in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever has Berry taken as skanky a role as Leticia Musgrove, a greasy-spoon waitress whose husband, Lawrence (Sean Combs), is on death row and whose son, Tyrell (a touching Coronji Calhoun), is an abused obese emotional mess. Matching their troubles are those of the Grotowski family, three generations of death-row guards: patriarch Buck (Peter Boyle as Joe with a Southern accent), a racist troglodyte on oxygen; Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), an embittered redneck widower; and Hank's son Sonny (Heath Ledger), an unwilling executioner and an another abused emotional mess.

Through an unlikely series of melodramatic events Leticia and Hank get together (what's more unlikely is that they hadn't met before, since he's guarding her husband), Hank turns into Mike Dukakis, Leticia embraces the oppressor, and the two fall in love. The title refers to the party thrown by the guards on the eve of an execution; it might as well refer to the now notorious scene in which Halle and Billy Bob bare all in a desperately animalistic but painfully self-conscious coupling. That should get Berry an Oscar nod; the film, on the other hand, despite some touchingly precise nuances, doesn't survive its grotesqueries. At the Showcase (Seekonk Route 6 and Warwick Mall).