Eye of the Beholder (1999)

Based on the critically acclaimed 1980 suspense novel by Marc Behm, ''Eye of the Beholder'' more or less throws ''Vertigo,'' ''The Conversation,'' ''Body Double,'' and -- so help me -- ''Duel in the Sun'' into a blender and hits puree. McGregor plays the Eye, a pasty-faced surveillance geek at the British Embassy in Washington who, while investigating the blackmail of his boss' son, stumbles across one Joanna Eris (Judd), and watches in awed terror as she lures the young man to her home, butchers him with a carving knife, then wails psychotically for her dead father. Needless to say, he falls in love.

Having elicited our sympathies, the movie embarks on a sub-Hitchcockian cross-country ramble as the Eye trails Joanna through a series of personalities, wigs, hotel rooms, and random murders. Just when the plot begins to sag, though, our hero does something bad -- I mean, Really Bad -- that effectively destroys any remaining emotional interest we might have in the guy.

In a sense, that's when ''Eye of the Beholder'' gets interesting. Or rather, so lunatic that it becomes highly entertaining in an I've-never-seen-a-building-collapse-like-THAT way. By the time k.d. lang signs off as the Eye's embassy contact, and Geneviève Bujold turns up as a creepy dominatrix therapist, and Jason Priestley romps through as a bottle-blond junkie-rapist, and the Eye has tracked Joanna to a diner in Alaska, there's not much else for viewers to do but give themselves over to the whims of the bad-movie gods.

For the record, this reviewer would willingly pay cash money to watch Ashley Judd read hog reports -- and, okay, would watch Ewan McGregor read hog reports but wouldn't be willing to pay for it -- so it's nice to relay that none of this seems the actors' fault. It's writer-director Stephan Elliott (''The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert'') who gets the laurel and hearty handshake for this puppy. Clearly, he set out to make a perverse, damned romance about a watcher who loses all perspective. Just as clearly, he fell into the same trap.