AN INCESTUOUS COMEDY OF TERRORS

By RICHARD CORLISS

The rich are different; they kill with epigrams. In the Pascal mansion just before Thanksgiving dinner, Mother (Genevieve Bujold) says, "I'm going to go baste the turkey and hide the kitchen knives." When daughter Jackie-O (Parker Posey) is asked what a gun is doing in the house, she shrugs: "Just being gunlike. Gun-esque. Gun-onic."

Mark Waters' The House of Yes, from the Wendy MacLeod play, is a place of infinite possibilities and their fatal consequences. If two isolated children are attracted to each other, they'll satisfy their urge by any means necessary. If a fellow (Freddie Prinze Jr.) wants to have sex with his brother's fiance, he will. If a gun shows up in the first reel, it will surely go off in the last. Is this tragic? Not for the Pascals. Just trag-esque. Trag-onic.

Think of an old-dark-house party catered by Noel Coward. A place as creepy as the Pascals' needs a virgin sacrifice, and that would be Lesly (Tori Spelling), a waitress engaged to the young master of the house, Jackie-O's twin Marty (Josh Hamilton). He's halfway between normal and nuts, while Jackie lives in lunacy as if it were the garden room at high tea. Her favorite delusion is that she is Jacqueline Kennedy on the day of her husband's death. She's just a bit confused about the identity of the assassin.

Bujold has the frazzled hauteur of an aging, neglected star, and Spelling is nicely glazed, studiously artless. But the film is keyed to Posey's performance: perfectly brittle, faultlessly false. As the most toxic of this family of vipers, she creeps and stings, and no one dares look away.

--By Richard Corliss