Les Diaboliques, a quick-and-dirty pseudonoir from French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, is basically an extended, tension-wracked, psyched-out setup for one terrific ending. Yes, Clouzot is one of the best directors of melodrama who ever lived; yes, he had a profound influence, not only on Hitchcock, but on generations of well-schooled moviemakers; and yes, Les Diaboliques is available on video (along with his equally masterful The Wages of Fear, 1953) and it’s pretty much a must-see. If you’re familiar with the earlier film, you may wonder why I chose to inflict the 1996 remake on myself. I’m not really sure, but I think curiosity got the best of me. There’s something morbidly fascinating about the way Hollywood chews up good ideas and then hawks them back up onto the pavement outside the studio lot.

This new Diabolique should be in a textbook somewhere under the heading "How Not to Remake a Thriller," especially since it seemed designed for optimal junky fun. Isabelle Adjani and Sharon Stone play the hapless wife and earthy mistress, respectively, of schoolmaster Chazz Palminteri, an evil man who comes to a bad/good end when his two ostensible lovers conspire to murder him in the bathtub. They haul his lifeless body back to the school estate and dump it in the scum-covered swimming pool, and then settle into the grind of daily life, waiting for the body to rise to the surface. The delicious problem is that the body never shows up, and when the pool has to be drained, it’s empty. Either the husband has survived -- which bodes most unwell for our sinful protagonists -- or somebody saw what the women did, and has obvious plans for blackmail.

Having girded for the worst, my first surprise was how competent the movie could be, from moment to moment. The first few reels have an interesting fleshiness to them, from a pale nude Adjani sprawled unconscious across the bathroom floor to an expert Stone pumping her half-clad self up and down on top of Palminteri in the dark, that gives a frantic and tactile charge to the inevitable murder scene (this may be largely due to the efforts of crackerjack film editor Carol Littleton, who cut E.T., Silverado, and the excellent Swimming to Cambodia). And from there, the film’s a little clunky, but it’s fairly absorbing. Adjani’s wide-eyed hysterics are just about right for her role (much diminished from the original), and Stone’s sneering tramp may be a caricature, but it’s a servicable caricature. In fact, she has some of the best lines (when Adjani’s Catholic guilt wells up, Stone deadpans, "killing him is a good thing, like planting a tree") and points up the fact that if director Jeremiah S. Chechik (Benny & Joon, no thank you) and screenwriter Don Roos (Single White Female, Boys on the Side) had been shrewd enough to make a more deliberately comic film, it might have worked.

As is, you’re never sure whether the movie’s camp outbursts are intentional, and its stabs at resonance fall flat. A scene where Adjani paces in front of a classroom full of students, reciting the conjugations of "I desire," is a direct transfer of one of the original film’s most haunting moments, but it’s glossed over this time, as though the director is unaware of the scene’s significance -- or simply knows that the internal lives of these cardboard characters won’t stand up to any scrutiny. Kathy Bates shows up at the halfway mark to sleepwalk through her part as a nosy private investigator, and her significant presence can’t add a third dimension to the self-consciously "feminist" role.

Worse, this new film spends too much time telegraphing the rather clever climax of the story. And when that climax comes, disaster strikes, and Diabolique plummets from its comfortable mediocrity into a distasteful soup of surprise endings. In a lame attempt at "updating" the original, this Diabolique makes a stunning error of judgment, and loses any chance it had of making an impression. If you’ve never seen the original, I’m glad I have this chance to warn you away from the remake. Fans of Stone, Adjani, and Kathy Bates may find some entertainment value here, but unless they watch Clouzot’s version of the story first, they’re robbing themselves of a truly thrilling experience. In the end, Diabolique is only interesting as an object lesson in what contemporary filmmakers are doing wrong.