Released this week on DVD: "Serious Moonlight"

Grade: D

Serious Moonlight suggests an unholy, watered-down hybrid of The Ref and Funny Games played as a chirpy screwball comedy, if you can imagine something so bizarre.

Based on a screenplay by Adrienne Shelly, who wrote, directed and co-starred in the independent hit Waitress, it may be the year's talkiest movie. And as its yammering stars Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton go through the motions of trying to emulate Carole Lombard and Cary Grant, you wait impatiently for a comic spark to ignite.

Three years ago Shelly, who was 40, was killed in her New York apartment by a construction worker bent on robbery, and her promising career was cut short. Although the film's production notes maintain that the screenplay was finished at the time of her death, it doesn't feel that way, especially when the movie ends with an abrupt thud. Since much of it is set in a bathroom in which the lead characters Louise (Ryan) and Ian (Hutton), immobilized by duct tape, are held prisoner, Serious Moonlight has the static, claustrophobic atmosphere of a two-character play.

Cheryl Hines (Cheryl David on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm), who co-starred with Shelly and Keri Russell in Waitress, makes her directorial debut with Serious Moonlight. The choice makes sense in that the movie aspires to the same tone of rancid hilarity as the far more sophisticated and diabolically misanthropic Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The couple's ordeal begins when Louise, an assertive corporate lawyer and superwoman, arrives home a day early from a business trip at the country house outside New York that she shares with Ian, her husband of 13 years. Finding the place strewn with rose petals, she assumes than Ian has prepared for a romantic weekend home.

Her fantasy is immediately shattered when he confesses that he has fallen in love with Sara (Kristen Bell), a 24-year-old receptionist for whom the floral greeting was intended. He is planning to whisk Sara to Paris the next morning, leaving Louise the farewell letter that he was finishing when she unexpectedly barged in.

A furious Louise bops Ian on the head with a flower pot, then ties him to a chair while he is unconscious. When he comes to, she uses her wiles -- his favorite cookies, sexy clothes, old home movies of happier days -- to try to woo him back. Ian talks his way out of bondage only to be bopped on the head again as he is about to escape. He lands in an upstairs bathroom taped to a toilet.

Louise leaves, and Ian's cries for help are eventually heard by a sinister-looking landscaper (Justin Long) passing by the house on a lawnmower. Sizing up the situation, he proceeds to assault Ian and ransack the house.

Louise, upon returning, is knocked out and held prisoner, while the burglar and his lowlife friends raid the liquor supply and party all night long.

Eventually, Sara, in a rage after Ian didn't show up at the airport, appears and is also taken captive. The shallow, whiny Sara is a real pill.

In their angry repartee Louise and Ian get off an occasionally witty zinger about marriage and its discontents, and Ryan uses her considerable ability for physical comedy to make Louise a formidable opponent in this suburban Punch and Judy show. But Serious Moonlight is a very shallow comedy.

For the real thing, rent The Ref, in which Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis, with a boost from Glynis Johns, set the house on fire.