"Black Snake Moan is the oddest, most peculiar movie I've seen about sex and race and redemption in the Deep South",
wrote Roger Ebert. Not surprisingly, considering that he's referring to a movie in which Samuel L. Jackson chains a half-naked Christina Ricci to a radiator. What's more surprising is that the movie is actually about how Jackson and Ricci slowly become friends and come to love and respect each other. Written and directed by Craig Brewer (best known for his film debut, ''Hustler & Flow'', which won an Oscar for its song, ''It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"), ''Black Snake Moan'' begins with Christina Ricci in constant need of sexual gratification. For her, it's either getting fucked, or falling to the ground and writhing as if under attack by fire ants. So when Jackson finds her beaten and raped on the side of the road, and chains her to that radiator, his motives are actually very noble - the idea is to cure her nymphomania through a radical withdrawal treatment. "I aim to cure you of your wickedness," announces Jackson, who bravely resists the temptation when Ricci offers herself to him in exchange for her freedom. It is the performances that make this movie. According to Ebert, Samuel L. Jackson considers it his best film role ever (not an obvious boast for someone who played Gator in ''Jungle Fever'' and Jules in ''Pulp Fiction''), but as an article in Variety rightly points out, "it is Ricci who will be remembered when all else about the film has been forgotten (...) Ricci is clad in scanty cutoffs, panties, midriff-baring shirts at most and often less. Here she is a feral animal, a force of nature, a wild thing with a ferocious physicality and a sexuality like Vesuvius in its prime. Her Rae is Eros unplugged, unquenchable, inexhaustible. Fascinating, scary and entirely debauched, Rae is the sort of female creature who has been seen onscreen many times before, but rarely, or perhaps never, so bluntly portrayed in a Hollywood studio film".
