Writer-director Craig Brewer wriggles at the far edge of the socially acceptable, and he does so with some of the fearlessness of the exploitation filmmakers of the Sixties and Seventies: the title itself distinctly echoes Blacksnake, the contribution of Russ Meyer, "King of the Nudies," to the racial discourse. Except that today the fearlessness faces tougher scrutiny, not the friendly reception of a specialized audience in a fragmented market, at the corner of the public eye, but right out in plain view, smack in the middle of the mainstream. That would seem to demand an even greater fearlessness, if the filmmaker didn't exercise some self-restraint, draw back from the edge, hedge his bets. The central image of the film (and, in a demurer version, its poster) is that of a battered and bruised young white woman in crop top and cotton bikini panties, chained at the waist on a thirty-foot tether, in the cabin of an old Southern black man, an ex-bluesman with gold teeth and the dome of Disney's Uncle Remus. But please don't misunderstand. It's for her own good: "I aim to cure you of your wickedness." The film takes its own sweet time to show how she ended up, in her clad-only condition, bloody eye, bloody nose, bloody lip, at the side of the road in front of that cabin; and it doesn't blanch at the seamy details in the life of this desanitized Daisy Mae, this archetypal Town Slut. When the two paths have finally crossed, there's no need to ask why a black man of that generation would not immediately call the police. Instead, he does what he sees as the Christian thing, nursing her back to health himself; and the chain around her waist is but a logical, if innovative and provocative, extension. The film can thus indulge, practically guilt-free, in assorted bondage imagery (to say nothing of inverted slavery imagery), and it is littered with suggestive poses suitable for the cover of a Torrid Paperback, more than enough of these for the Complete Works of Erskine Caldwell. Despite the depth and warmth of the relationships, despite, too, the palpable pity for the emotionally and intellectually handicapped, and despite the reverent, and on one occasion rowdy, celebration of the Southern blues tradition, the film never really transcends its trashiness. It wallows in it. With gusto. Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, Justin Timberlake. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd