Once again Tyler Perry’s career has reared its ugly head and taken a run at my lineup–the folks out at Lions Gate sent over a copy of For Colored Girls for me to review, and thus, I did. Would it be the infuriating, self-righteous, high dollar schtick of Why Did I Get Married Too? Would it be the low-budget confused rambling mess that was Madea’s Big Happy Family The Play? Or would the Broken Clock Principle give me, for once, a good movie from Tyler Perry?

For Colored Girls, based on something called a choreopoem with the terrifyingly inscrutable name of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf” (and that typo is actually part of the choreopoem) follows a group of people who do various things in a bid to learn more about themselves, and have various things happen to them over the course of several hours.

Or something like that. And maybe it’ll only feel like several hours. Frankly, this thing is about as transparent and accessible as the metal face of a ten-pound sledgehammer. By about the end of the first half hour I was convinced that this was clearly translated from the original Klingon. I’ve seen Japanese horror movies that made more sense than this massive lump of incoherent babbling drivel.

The second half hour, sadly, started to make more sense, in that this was a movie that would resolutely refuse to make sense. This is not a movie with a constant narrative–this is little more than a series of events with precious little to interconnect them. This isn’t a movie–this is an exercise in egomania. And this may be the shame of the age.

Why? Because there are fantastic actresses in this. Phylicia Rashad is a genius. Whoopi Goldberg has been doing amazing things for years. Even relative newcomers like Macy Gray and Anika Noni Rose do a nice job of things. But they’re in the middle of this morass of a plot that is going nowhere and doing so at incredibly slow speeds.

And worse yet, the cliches are sufficiently thick that even Lifetime wouldn’t touch this slop–the women are enlightened paragons of various virtues, the ambitious, the powerful, the gentle, the caring; the men, meanwhile, are the paragons of vices, manipulators, rapists, thieves, violent drunkards, existing only to feed off of the women in any of dozens of ways.

It’s preposterous, it’s incomprehensible, it’s pretentious, it’s utter, utter garbage. It takes brilliant actresses and wastes them on third-rate material so laden with cliches and ultimately nonsensical that it is beyond redemption.

It is a waste of plastic for which Tyler Perry has earned one more reason to apologize to those unfortunate enough to view his work.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives For Colored Girls a two out of ten, acknowledging the only thing about this that is any good, the wonderful actresses involved, and spitting on the putrefacted carcass that is the rest of this movie.