Spike Lee's Summer of Sam is everything the Hayes Office feared back in the days of movie censorship, a movie that unapologetically explodes into a world of excessive violence, guiltless fornication and flashy vice.

Maybe such details give us insight into the real world of 1977 New York, when deranged "Son of Sam" killer David Berkowitz haunted the overheated streets, but Lee's cesspool of a film leaves no room for anything positive or uplifting. Certainly somewhere in this depraved city, a boy scout is helping an old lady across the street.

Thought it may be a portrait of human nature at its worst, Summer of Sam still comes packaged in the flashy disguise of a hip summer blockbuster. For all its faults, which you can count on my enumerating below, it does manage to cull what are likely to be the year's best performances, especially from John Leguizamo.

Just after Jimmy Breslin (the columnist who received letters from Berkowitz that crazy summer) introduces the film as a portrait of 1977 New York City, a town he "loves and hates equally," Summer of Sam opens with the first of many disarming bursts of violence. Lee's camera moves in on a pair of young brunettes chatting in a parked car as though they might become main characters later in the film. A stocky man approaches the vehicle, peeks inside as if to ask a question and then fires a pistol through the open window, splattering its occupants across the car's interior like watermelons beneath Gallagher's mallet.

With the startling murder of the two young ladies, I knew I was in over my head. Berkowitz confessed to six murders committed at the Satanic behest of a neighbor's black labrador, yet Lee shows us the unnecessarily gory details of at least a dozen shootings or missed opportunities. This film isn't even about Son of Sam, his killings, the 1977 summer heat wave, the New York blackout, the Yankees winning the World Series or any of these things, yet those are the details that drown out the more intriguing plight of the characters adrift in a crazy summer.

Knowing that Son of Sam is on the prowl and planning to kill again sends the entire city into a state of paranoia, and Lee picks up his story in the midst of the hysteria. As the disco movement simmers down—with Dionna (Mira Sorvino) and her runaround husband Vinny (John Leguizamo) making the most of the dying days of an era—a new punk style emerges. Nothing about these times seems as it should: a threatening mob of grungy punks can turn out to be more rational than their more mainstream counterparts, and violence can seek out and shatter the romance of a secluded spot where two lovers have parked to make out.

With little to go on, the police turn to a local mob boss (Ben Gazzara) for help. Under his influence, the predominantly Italian neighborhood where Berkowitz's killings were concentrated seals itself off from the rest of the city. At night, a bloodthirsty mob patrols the streets like villagers storming Frankenstein's castle.

In Lee's mind, Italians seem to be the modern equivalent of the Cro-Magnon, and it's no surprise that the Italians sworn to defend the neighborhood from Son of Sam will eventually turn their pestilent rage on the only character in the film who seems out of place. In this case, a sympathetic local named Ritchie (Adrien Brody) returns from England sporting spiked hair, a punk look and a false accent, and immediately becomes the brunt of their hostility: "You come back looking like a fucking freak, like an English fag, and we're supposed to be okay with that?"

It's only a matter of time before their savage intolerance turns violent, and in the meantime, Lee entertains us with innocent young ladies getting their brains splattered out the backs of their heads and lurid peeks into the world of punk music, gay porn and marital infidelity. Resisting my immediate urge to get up and leave the theater—the subject matter I could tolerate, handled better in a countless number of other films—I sat through the entire fiasco, an experience that feels like drowning in a bilious pool of self-congratulation as Lee gives himself a nauseating, 136-minute pat on the back for his social consciousness.

Summer of Sam finds Lee trying to do Oliver Stone, an approach which I'm not even sure Stone has figured out yet. Lee fiddles with film stocks and techniques; he jumbles historical television footage with recreated "news" (most noticeably, Lee himself posing as a TV reporter covering the "black side" of the story); he tosses in a head-spinning montage set to The Who's "Baba O'Riley" at a pivotal point. Lee understands the mechanics but misses the potential of such an approach and gets too caught up in his form, letting the most powerful elements of the narrative slip by unattended.

With the possible exception of watching Pasolini's Salo, I don't know that I've ever been so offended by a film, and even then, the filmmaker was making an important statement. But the message in Lee's film is tacked on like an afterthought, and the moral itself is such an innate part of our current political correctness that the entire experience seems a callous waste of our time.

Lee forces us to sit through two hours of excessive gore and general unpleasantness, only to lead up to a 20-minute, watered-down condensation of Do the Right Thing. He must have woken up one morning and taken a look at the world, realized that Do the Right Thing hasn't improved race relations one bit and decided to turn up the intensity.

There's no getting around that Lee has made this movie before as a subtler, superior product. He approaches new material here, but doesn't know what to do with it, most obvious in Vinny's coming to terms with the fact that he can get the kind of sex he wants from anyone but his wife. Vinny can rationalize infidelity, but asking his wife for anything more than a short, unsatisfying poke, missionary-style in the dark, well, that's "a fuckin' sin." One of Vinny's carnal flings becomes a near run-in with Son of Sam, inspiring a quick pledge to be "the best husband you ever had in your entire life," but such a promise is only as earnest as a sacrifice broken on the first day of Lent. Lee's on to something here, though he never takes full advantage of this thread, leaving Vinny with this problem (and others) to sort out after the film ends.

Apparently, Lee is more focused on wanting us to squirm until we've purged all prejudice from our systems, from "The System." He goes too far, ending up with a film so extreme its only real value might be rehabilitating droogs from A Clockwork Orange or reforming the lowest, most insensitive members of our society.

A number of critics have come to the defense of Lee's ghastly film, finding something to respect in this in-your-face rehash of his familiar theme. People don't need positive reviews of Summer of Sam; they're tempted enough by the tantalizing hints of nastiness offered up in the previews. What they need are screaming warnings, front-page newspaper headlines in 72-point all-caps ordering them to draw the blinds, bolt the doors and stay locked in their houses.