Set in the summer of 1965, Alabama is narrated by Peejoe (Lucas Black, Slingblade) – short for Peter Joseph – a young boy in a small town that still hasn’t been notified of the Emancipation Proclamation. As the film opens, his oddball Aunt Lucille (Melanie Griffith, Another Day in Paradise) tells Peejoe that she has killed her husband of thirteen years and father of her seven children. Lucille used rat poison to kill her victim – because "that’s what you use when you want to kill a rat" – before decapitating him with an electric knife and leaving his remains in a basement freezer as she squeals out of town to the strains of "These Boots are Made for Walking." She is an aspiring actress who dreams of landing a gig on Bewitched and heads for Los Angeles to pursue her unlikely goal.

Peejoe, who had previously lived with his Aunt Lucille, is shipped off to live with his Uncle Dove (David Morse, The Negotiator), a soft-spoken funeral director. As summer heats up, so does the tension in the still racially segregated small town. Peejoe witnesses the murder of a black youth that had merely used the white-only pool facilities. The fact that the murder was committed by Sheriff John Doggett (Meat Loaf, Fight Club) inspires Peejoe to speak out publicly about racial injustice. Black couldn’t look more like a hillbilly, but Peejoe has a perpetual look of surprise when he watches the actions of his community.

Although the film seems a little choppy at first because of the transition between the racism and Lucille plots, the picture is very well paced. One storyline takes a depressing look at an ugly portion of American history and the other is almost like a fable, with Lucille stealing a car in New Orleans, busting out of jail in Texas, breaking the bank in Las Vegas and eventually hitting it big in Hollywood. The big courtroom finale that ties the two together is pretty well done, with only Griffith’s weepy monologue seeming a bit too much. The judge is played by Rod Steiger, who was either drunk or had never seen his lines before. Another possibility for his odd acting was that Banderas filmed a rehearsal without Stieger’s knowledge.

Griffiths does quite a decent job tackling the role of Lucille. With her long legs, black hair, big red lips and blue eyes she looks like she could be the mother of Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron, if they were sisters (and wouldn’t you have loved to live next door to that family). Her Lucille is plagued by the voice of her decapitated husband throughout the film, most likely on account of carrying his head around in a hat box the entire time. Cathy Moriarty (Gloria), Richard Schiff (The West Wing), John Beasley (The General’s Daughter), Robert Wagner (Austin Powers) and Noah Emmerich (The Truman Show) round out this bizarre cast.

1:55 - for violence, thematic material, language and adult situations