Seeing Samuel L. Jackson holding a girl captive with an iron chain in a movie trailer was all I needed to be persuaded to see this movie. I already knew there would be bevy of ‘motherf*%#ers’ and the unnecessary yelling (No, I can’t stop yellin’, ’cause that’s how I talk. Ain’t you never seen my movies?”) that Sam Jackson is famous for, but a chained up Christina Ricci put me over the top. I guess you could call it an old crush.

Set in a part of the country that’s known for debutantes and southern belles, Black Snake Moan shows that not all women from the south are as lady-like as advertised. Rae (Christina Ricci) is such a woman. She has what southerners call ‘that Itch’, and all she wants is for it to be scratched. Repeatedly… and all around town. ‘That Itch’ becomes trouble when her high school sweetheart Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) decides he wants to make something of himself in the military and ships off for a tour of duty, leaving Rae sad, lonely, and ultimately horny. A big party that night that was supposed to ease her pain ends disastrously when she is left half-naked and beat up on the side of a deserted country road.

Enter Lazarus. Laz (Sam Jackson), as his good friends call him, has an itch of his own to scratch. He just wants to be loved, and his wife just told him he wasn’t. The only way he sees getting through this is large amounts of liquor and playing the blues on his guitar, which in the end is all any man really needs. Laz wakes up from a hangover one morning to see an unconscious young woman lying just outside his property with a black eye that would scare most pets (as seen in numerous commercials), and tends to her wounds like any neighborly southerner with any sense would do. After going into town to get medicine, he discovers the legend of Rae and the ‘Itch’ that she’s known for from one of the town drug dealers. A religious man, Lazarus accepts this chance meeting as a mission from God to cure Rae of her ‘wickedness’ and turn her into the lady she was born to be.

An unlikely mix of sex, music, and spirituality make Black Snake Moan the definite catch of the early Spring. We get to enjoy Sam Jackson at the top of his game as an older blues singer who is run down by life. We get to witness a sandy blonde-haired Christina Ricci making bold moves in her young, but seasoned, career by appearing in all her glory for the majority of the 115 minutes of runtime. We are also able to learn that Hustle And Flow was not a fluke hit for writer/director Craig Brewer and he can indeed pump out another fine movie about untold life in the south. I consider this an educational film as well. I learned that chaining up a 110 pound white girl could be both humorous and heart-warming. I learned that nymphomania is an actual disease and not just something I wished my ex-girlfriend was a victim of. I finally learned that Justin Timberlake has a future in the film industry if he ever fails to bring sexy back. He does pretty decent work.

My ending conclusion: See it as soon as possible, just don’t bring the kids. Say what you will about the sexual content, but even my girlfriend enjoyed the movie.