That's not to say I recommend The Hitcher. The film sickened me, actually, because it goes to all the trouble to create a compassionate, loving female love interest (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) just to senselessly kill her off and give the audience a jolt they won't soon forget. I guess it worked.

Movies like The Hitcher still exist, but they're smarter and sneakier, and sometimes they even try to convince you they're art. These movies take on subdued names like Seven and star Oscar-winning actors like Morgan Freeman. They feature lush noirish cinematography and pack their stories full of references to Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Hemingway and other literary giants. In between gruesome slayings, these films try to convince you that it all means something.

And Seven--short for "the seven deadly sins"--is good enough that it almost succeeds. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker and director David Fincher go to great lengths to detail the philosophical attitudes of retiring homicide detective Freeman and his reckless youthful partner, Brad Pitt. Parallels are drawn between Freeman's cynicism about the sickness of society and the motives of the serial killer. Troubled questions arise: Is the fight for good worth fighting? At what cost? And so on.

Of course, all of this takes place in a world of such studied visual darkness that you can't help but feel there must be some deep themes hiding in the corners someplace. The movie is all flashlights and lovely, shadowy mutilated corpses, like a two-hour tour through all the storage rooms Jodie Foster didn't visit in Silence of the Lambs.

You might recall that director Fincher was the guiding mind behind Alien3, which turned Alien's boogeyman story into a parable of sin and redemption and turned Sigourney Weaver's Ripley into a combo Christ/Virgin Mary symbol. You might also recall that none of this added up to anything, and the movie wasn't very scary, either. Well, at least Seven gets the scary part right.

The movie's serial killer is as menacing as they come, to the point where even the sight of what might be him standing down the hall generates a freakish apprehension. He's played by Kevin Spacey, who apparently gets a big kick out of playing "my-brain-is-bigger-than-yours" types. His character in Seven isn't that smart though; instead of wearing gloves to prevent fingerprints, something even O.J. figured out, Spacey cuts off his fingertips. And his murders--which punish people for lying, dealing drugs, knowingly spreading disease, and so on--don't exactly amount to a provocative social statement. (Then again, I'm biased because I just read the Unabomber manuscript. Wow.)

The most useful thing you can say about Seven is that you will never again forget the Seven Deadly Sins. Before the movie, I heard people in the audience trying to remember them: "Uh, greed, and anger, and um, wrath, and pride, and vanity, and avarice...I'm missing one." For the record, they're Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Vanity, Lust, Envy and Wrath. (Does anybody know what the Seven Cardinal Virtues are? I'd like to see that movie.) By the way, if you're interested in seeing a terrific movie featuring the Seven Deadly Sins, I heartily recommend the Faustian comedy Bedazzled starring Dudley Moore, Raquel Welch (as Lust) and the late, great Peter Cook as the devil himself.

Despite its art, Seven is little more than an elaborate and rather clever puzzle piece. The whole point of the movie's existence is to neatly fulfill the killer's desire to punish each one of the sins in an artful way. I might have been more impressed by Seven's success at achieving this mechanical, exploitative goal if the film hadn't created human characters for me to care about. Seven is like an artsier version of The Hitcher, complete with a gruesome stomach-turning death, but it's a much worse film because it tries to fool you into thinking there's a meaning behind the madness.