Looking for a love story that’s a little twisted? A little dose of retro? Well, the crew out at Lions Gate sent out a copy of The Rules Of Attraction for us to review, and it’s a dose of what was going on way back when, if “way back when” means “about 2002, but set in 1999″.

The Rules Of Attraction follows some of Camden College’s finest minds…okay, not so much. More like “some dimwits whose parents likely paid their tuition and are doing their level best to waste every nickel of mommy and daddy’s money by partying themselves blind and humping like frenzied monkeys who got into a vat of Ecstacy”. We’ll be following some of these future corporate lawyers and such around as they have sex, drink heavily, enjoy illegal drugs, and often find their lives running both forward and backward like director Roger Avary was trying make some GRAND ARTISTIC STATEMENT (and you say that in all caps because that’s how it’s meant to be).

Looking for a point here? Coherent plotline? Tough luck, kids, because you won’t be getting a whole lot of that. Of course, this was actually based on the novel by the same name by Bret Easton Ellis, which means you’re going to be getting this kind of thing a lot.

Admittedly, if you’re into the whole slice-of-life thing, you’ll do nicely here. It’s a pretty good look at some of these people’s lives, though for the most part, you’ll wonder why we’re bothering to look at the empty, vapid little lives of holier-than-thou intellectuals, drug pushers, drama queens (of either gender!)  and other similar such nonsense. Admittedly, some parts of this are surprisingly funny, many more of them are just kind of sad, because they’re pretty authentic. Authentic, but pointless.

And that’s the best way to describe The Rules of Attraction: authentic, but pointless. Seriously, everything you’re watching here makes perfect sense, may well be happening somewhere, but is so purely mundane and so bereft of any kind of redeeming quality or continuing narrative that it’s pretty much a waste of time and Blu-ray plastic. Oh, and toward the end, it will start to get downright disturbing on top of it.

The Screenhead hands The Rules of Attraction, a massive niche title of limited appeal, a six out of ten. It’s nothing great, and is really only good in certain circumstances and to only a few very specific kinds of people. But for those people, this should do a bang-up job of providing those things they want.