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This ridiculous, contrived, and artless bore of a movie, in one of its countless aesthetic miscalculations, mistakes a stately pace for depth and profundity. It rises above the typical summer film pap for a single reason -- it thinks it has Ideas about Big Issues. It automatically plunges back to a suitable level, however, as it demonstrates this broad lack of ideas at an interminable pace.

The makers of this shallow dreck seem to think they have made a thinking person's summer popcorn movie about Death, and The American Family, and Love, and The Breakdown Of The American Family, and The Loss Of Love. But really, it's just another jumble of the same old crap: cardboard characters in prefab situations, behaving as they do because the plot needs them to, not for any intrinsic reason, and not -- resolutely not -- with any underlying impulse or motivation.

Aside from its laughably sophomoric spiritual pose, The Sixth Sense is also shoddily constructed. Most of the scenes are either fake and stagey, redundant, irrelevant, obvious, or all of the above, and they are edited together with the sloppiest imprecision. There is no sense of drama, mystery or anything else.

Although some of the imagery is imaginative and the production design is superb, they are placed in the service of an inert, smug and witless vision, presumably that of its writer/director. This unintentionally comic garbage makes "Jacob's Ladder" look like Bergman.

The Sixth Sense is strictly for amateurs.

British period pieces typically suffocate under the dull weight of precise costumes and historically accurate settings, offering nothing but boring, predictable and comforting aesthetics. Here is a stronger number, true to the tired genre but beyond it -- a period piece with strong, well-developed themes and balanced, multidimensional characters liberated from crusty, faux bourgeois literariness. Aside from haunting, perfectly pitched performances, it examines questions that matter: What constitutes personality? What constitutes class? Is one contingent on the other? If a "coarse" man can be transformed into a convincing "gentleman," what is he really? And if the class boundaries are truly porous and arbitrary, what is their true function and purpose? Don't let the superficially "Masterpiece Theatre"-ish trappings fool you -- this mysterious, stimulating picture has a pulse.

More like To The Devil A Rubber Puppet. Or maybe, To Richard Widmark, A Quick Paycheck. Reasonably well-directed but pointless Omen/Rosemary's Baby rip-off, salvaged to an extent by the classy B-movie cast. Unfortunately, the players are uniformly listless, particularly the young Kinski, who seems too aware of being on camera, especially during her obligatory nude scene. Aside from that particular moment, this movie is a dull, humorless timewaster.