Unfortunately, Twentieth Century Fox is doing what it can to keep the movie under wraps. After the film was finished, it was subjected to multiple testings. Then, the studio boss who had greenlighted the picture stepped down from his position and the film was tested some more. Finally, it was ordered to be recut.

None of these hassles are radically unusual, but in the context of what would happen later, all of the steps are portentous. Next the film was bumped from a prestigious November opening into the February ghetto. And now the trouble is with the marketing. Except for New York and Los Angeles, there were reportedly no ads in last Sunday's papers. So if you live in most of the country and haven't caught any of the TV spots, you won't even know the movie is opening.

There may not be much most critics can do to alert potential audiences. Fox didn't screen the movie for New York critics until Wednesday night, about a day and a half before the opening. This guarantees that the weeklies won't get to cover the movie before the all-important opening weekend, and that most daily critics will have limited time and space to meet their Friday deadline. This is the strategy that the studios use when they have no faith in a movie and do everything they can to try and make it look like a bomb. As Pauline Kael once wrote, "Mediocrity and stupidity certainly don't scare them; talent does." By that standard, "Monkeybone" must have had the brain trust at Fox shitting in their Helmut Langs.

The primary source for Sam Hamm's script is Kaja Blackley's graphic novel "Dark Town," but he and director Henry Selick (who also directed "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas") have borrowed from cheesy Saturday afternoon horror movies, comic books, model kits of cars and monsters, German expressionism, surrealist art, postcard art, the google-eyed monster hot-rodders of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, childhood memories of amusement parks and kiddie bad dreams and the sort of cheerfully crude kid's humor that slips out like an unexpected fart. "Monkeybone" tosses pop trash, the dream logic so beloved of the surrealists and the homegrown dada familiar from the wilder reaches of American comedy (W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Robert Crumb) into a Waring blender and pours out a spiked smoothie, an artist's neurotic fantasy of being taken over by his creation.

Brendan Fraser plays a cartoonist named Stu Miley (the name tag on his slacker cool mechanic's jacket reads S.Miley -- get it?) who, when we first meet him, is doing his best to hide behind his forelock. His comic series "Monkeybone" has been picked up by a network, Stu is wary of the 15 minutes the media moguls are affording him, and his schmooze-hound agent (David Foley) is fielding any merchandising offer he can get his hands on. All Stu wants is to slip away with his girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda) to their cozy, cluttered little cottage where he's ready to pop the question.

They never make it. A car accident leaves Stu in a coma. While his body vegetates in a hospital bed, his soul winds up in Downtown -- Purgatory as a sort of noir theme park. The inhabitants are straight out of Stu's childhood nightmares: a Cyclops figure who's all head; carnivorous looking piggies running barbecue stands; Siamese devil triplets in satiny powder-blue tuxes; a floating Abe Lincoln head that materializes in the sky. Everybody knows Stu. Downtown grooves on the nightmares of people on Earth, which play in a local theater -- the Morpheum. In a comic riff on how the public digs what artists suffer to produce, Stu has provided the locals with some of the funkiest they've ever seen.

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics