To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Homecoming"

Grade: F
Rich girl, poor girl, college golden boy and blue-collar sweetheart. Homecoming, an ugly little thriller in which Mike (Matt Long), a star high school quarterback who has won a scholarship to Northwestern brings his new girlfriend back to his shabby hometown over the Christmas holidays, might have been an incisive examination of class differences in Middle America. Instead the movie, directed by Morgan J. Freeman (not to be confused with Morgan Freeman, the actor), contents itself with being the dramatic equivalent of female mud wrestling: the hero’s jealous high school girlfriend, Shelby (Mischa Barton), who has remained obsessed with him, imprisons his upscale sweetheart, Elizabeth (Jessica Stroup), in her rundown farmhouse.

How Elizabeth ends up there is a far-fetched tale: she wanders alone on the road after being turned away from a sinister motel in the middle of the night; Shelby accidentally hits her with her car, then brings her home for emotional and physical abuse. Shelby’s nursing care consists of hooking Elizabeth up to an IV to sedate her and twisting her already broken ankle when she tries to escape. An ax appears, and later a gun. While Elizabeth is helpless, the sexy Shelby mobilizes all her wiles to seduce Mike.

Long’s football star is a bland pretty boy with no distinctive personality, and Stroup’s Elizabeth an attractive cipher. Shelby, as it develops, is a psychotic maniac who grows progressively more bonkers as the movie goes along. Homecoming is coldly efficient for what it is. But what it is is trash.