WHEN YOUR MOVIE TANKS, blame the Puritans. Never allow for the possibility that it just sucked like a bilge pump: “Usually when you want a movie to be so bad it’s funny, you can count on someone connected to the Basic Instinct franchise. Alas, they have let even their extremely forgiving audience down. . . . Few expected Basic Instinct 2 to be very good, but no one expected it to be this boring. . . . In this erotic-free film, as the dead bodies pile up, nothing is more dead than the movie itself.”

Interestingly, those are the presumably more sophisticated and less Puritanical critics. The presumably less sophisticated viewers mostly hate it too, but they don’t hate it as much. Puritanism, where is thy sting?

UPDATE: Jim Treacher offers a pungent response: “It’s not that people don’t feel like paying 20 bucks and sitting through 2 hours of ‘sexy’ dreck just to get to the good part that they can see on the Internet tomorrow anyway. It’s not that you’ve, I dunno, shot your wad?”