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For some incomprehensible reason, this opus-- billed as "the uncut European version"-- uses its Italian cast and location as a major selling point, but tries ludicrously to Americanize its characters, giving them faux-Yankee names and stupefying English dialogue that hardly anyone in the cast can handle. The dreadful oobie-doobie score, with its relentless overlay of drums, renders a lot of the weird scripted talk inaudible; when we can hear the actual words, they often could be Urdu.

Uomo opens in an apartment building near a nondescript intersection purportedly in Venice. (If so, it's the industrial end, with nary a canal; in badly processed color, it's a beige world with puce moments.) Two men, one dark, one skinny, lumber through a mediocre sex scene, the first of five. Then, before you can say "fast forward," the video plunges into the Twilight Zone as Dr. James Davenport appears.

Portrayed by an thickly accented Italian actor who may be the "Dr. Schpeunz" listed in the cast, Davenport spends a lot of time sitting behind his desk, taking his glasses off and putting them back on, lighting cigarettes, scribbling notes, playing with his pen, and staring into space. A psychologist who counsels men with sex problems, he's especially concerned about a young gay couple named Robert and David. Men come to see him, confess things like "I think sex with men," then go off and have sex. A typical consultation exchange: "I heard the nurse that told me that you making jogging this-a morning in the park!" "I'm practicing all days." "Is good new."

Some cast members do at least manage to shine despite the cheesy fungoid lunacy. These young men don't all have the rigorously gym-toned musculature of American porn clones, a facet that makes some of them all the more attractive. Luchino Visconti might have liked the way the Tintoretto-featured streaky blond who plays David fills his Drakkar Noir T-shirt and checked pants.