Chances are, even if you haven’t seen William Friedkin’s Jade, you know it’s a bad movie. (I was certainly forewarned when it came up on The Dissolve (RIP) podcast in a game where the beloved staff had to figure out whether the clue they’d just heard referred to Jade or the also terrible Sliver, likewise based on an Eszterhas screenplay.) It got dreadful reviews on its initial release–slammed as mediocre, muddled, and a waste of its cast and director’s talents–and no one, in the years since, has spearheaded a campaign for its critical reappraisal.

“No one … until now?” you ask.

Oh, no. No, no. Get someone else for that job.

Jade is truly terrible. When people say that it’s a confusing mess, don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re only referring to the swampy morass of its mystery plot. I suppose you could technically call it thought-provoking, but the thoughts it’s provoking are basic, baffled ones like, “Wait, is David Caruso a detective or an ADA?” I checked: he’s an ADA, but even Roger Ebert thought he was supposed to be a detective. You won’t be wondering about who skinned a blackmailer with a ceremonial axe, you’ll be too busy trying to work out why on earth these people are acting like this. Then you begin to wonder why the film is acting like this, and how you could have possibly wronged it and caused it to treat you this way. It’s confusing, dour, and nonsensical.

And not only is it not nearly as sexy as its poster would suggest, it’s often strangely puritanical. There are exactly two (2) beats that suggest that sex, including “alternative” sex, could potentially be fun and occur naturally; on top of that, this is an erotic thriller that can barely be bothered to consider its sex as enticingly dangerous. It’s prudish at heart, neither raw nor inventive. The wildest thrills it offers are heterosexual anal sex, intimacy pillows for better sex positions, and a dildo. The characters give us wide-eyed “people sure are strange these days” reactions to even things like a wedge-shaped pillow. Why, the very idea! What will they think of next? There’s a line where a character refers to “an X-rated gangbang,” as if to differentiate it from all those famous PG-rated gangbangs, and it feels oddly of a piece with the whole script. After all, if one reference to sex is naughty, two must be even naughtier. It doesn’t matter if the result is redundant, and it doesn’t matter if it’s all off-stage anyway. They’re talking about sex, so you must feel titillated. Now let’s all draw some boobs on our calculators.

But despite all that, honestly, you may want to see this movie. It didn’t mean to make me laugh, but I did laugh, and my wife even laughed so hard she cried. There are ostentatious scene transitions, dramatic zoom-ins on fertility masks, hilariously over-the-top crashes that result in injuries treated with Band-Aids, car chases that slow down to a crawl through a parade where everyone irritably attacks the hero’s car, cars that fly through the air, cars that get body-slammed into the sea, cars that commit extremely thorough murder … really, you’re here for the cars. This is not an erotic thriller, this is a car comedy. If you concentrate on that–on the delights of the overwrought, the bizarre, and the comically poorly executed–you can almost forget about what a raw deal you, and indeed some of the characters, get overall. Fuck it. Let’s ride.

Jade is streaming on the Criterion Channel. I couldn’t resist the Linda Fiorentino-centric poster.