It must have looked good on paper. A complete fiasco that’s being dumped on unsuspecting January audiences, Fascination—an over-the-top, laughably bad tale of adultery, murder, deceit and family inheritance—is a film so misguided by creator Klaus Menzel, you wonder no one involved jumped ship or at least raised a red flag. The film plays like a first draft screenplay shot with single takes of rehearsals. It’s that bad.

When her sportsman husband dies tragically in a swimming accident off their private Florida key, Maureen (Jacqueline Bissett, slumming) takes a rejuvenating pleasure cruise. She quickly hooks up with handsome Oliver Vance (Stuart Wilson), to the dismay of grieving only son and budding musician, Scott (Adam Garcia). They set up house on the island and immediately announce their plans to wed. Scott is appropriately shocked and shares his frustration with Oliver’s own adult daughter Kelly (Alice Evans), soon to be his stepsister, who falls hard for him and vice versa, despite her increasingly bizarre behavior. They share some peculiar similarities: Kelly’s mother, you see, died tragically as well. It doesn’t take long for the two youngsters to start unraveling suspicious details of their parents’ relationship and its deadly implications. But who’s lying to whom? Who really knows what happened? Is Kelly really what she seems? Does anyone care?

The answer, by the halfway point, is a concerted no. Fascination wants to be a hot-lust tale of forbidden passion, fear of trust and cool eroticism that might just be motivated by bloody murder. Even in the film’s conclusion, its two young lovers link sex with violence, mistrust with commitment. But all of this only makes the film sound much more interesting than it really is.

Bissett emerges admirably in a film far below her talents, though she performs with conviction in a nothing role. Wilson is a predictably off-the-shelf cad, and Evans shades the film’s most interesting character with inviting mystery, until the ludicrous and unbelievable plot throws her off the rails in the film’s last half-hour.

Likable Adam Garcia seems woefully out of his element here, after genial turns in such fare as Coyote Ugly and Bootmen. He’s a talented physical performer who can sing and dance with the best, which he proved as Tony Manero in the West End run of the musical "Saturday Night Fever" and on its accompanying soundtrack album. However, here he’s given a thankless role—the least interesting in the film—and he seems bored and often flat, monotone, forced, indicated in his big scenes, and the emotions ring false. I’m giving him a pass since this misguided muck would make a fool of DeNiro himself.

Fascination—we’re never quite sure what the title implies since everything on the screen is so uninteresting and passionless—is a film devoid of a single interesting scene. Garcia, however, parades through the entire film undressed (which says more about director Menzel than I care to know, really), nearly always shirtless or more. He’s quite a sight, even if he bungles the role.

It doesn’t help that Fascination is one of those contemporary potboilers that values plot—or plot twists, in this case—as superior to any real character development. Not a single character in the film feels dimensional in any sense—everyone here is a pallid extension of a serpentine narrative that becomes so longwinded, over-explained and expository that it sinks the entire film with its ludicrous revelations. It’s all standard issue—incest, family secrets (the film is big on these), cheating spouses, murder, obsession, explicit sex, and the old favorites, strategically tampered with medicine, strategically revealing photos and a strategically placed gas grill and a lit match—of course, the fact that the outdoor grill is inexplicably placed in someone’s living room should give you an idea where this film squarely rests—illogical, tepidly performed claptrap.

I could go on about the horrendous original pop songs that litter the soundtrack every ten minutes or so, the cliché lyrics to Scott’s "original" love song to Kelly, the unintentionally funny closing credits dialogue…. At times, Fascination is enjoyably, laughably bad. Most of the time, however, it’s just plain awful. Avoid it.