REEL CRITICS:Sam’s second snake flick fails

“Black Snake Moan” is a deep-fried, sweat-stained mess that should have gone straight to video. What with all the cheesy dialogue and thick-sliced ham being shoveled on screen, you’ll want to get your cholesterol checked.

Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) goes off to serve in the National Guard. Within hours of their tearful goodbye, his hoochie girlfriend Rae (Christina Ricci) has comforted herself with sex and drugs and is dumped, half-naked, by the side of a lonely Tennessee road.

Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) is distraught after his wife leaves him for his brother. Within hours he too is pretty bombed out of his mind. He picks a fight, and then his guitar.

He finds the girl and rescues her — but not before he chains her to the radiator so he can change her wicked ways. As an afterthought, he buys her some new clothes.

Together, they each find a way to deal with their own demons (a.k.a. “black snakes”). Ain’t that touching? But think how much more fun we could have had if he’d just put her in with a planeload of snakes.

But there are some important life lessons here. For instance, who knew that some down-home cooking and playing the blues had miraculous healing powers? That fresh-picked butter beans were an aphrodisiac? And that Justin Timberlake could act?

The best thing I can say is that Jackson sings a mean blues song. Everything else is pulp fiction.

In “Wild Hogs,” John Travolta, Ray Liotta and William H. Macy play out this predictable scenario. They join Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence as suburban dudes living out their phony “Easy Rider” biker fantasy without a shred of credibility or shame. They are part of several homophobic jokes that fall as flat as the rest of this failed comedy. The screenplay is contrived, insipid and painfully unfunny. This childish effort is an unworthy embarrassment for everyone involved.

Plenty of bacon for the actors, plenty boring for the viewersEvery now and then, a few A-List movie stars will take a vacation from real acting to appear in a low-brow comedy that is utterly beneath their talents. They cash a fat paycheck and have a lot of fun goofing off for the camera. But the audience suffers through a film so boring you can hardly stay awake through the many lame attempts at artificial humor.