The monumentally talented Christina Ricci stars in The Opposite of Sex as 16-year-old Dedee Truitt, the last person on Earth you'd want to meet in a dark alley -- not because she'd kill you, but because she'd be so mean to you, you'd decide to kill yourself. As the picture opens, Dedee takes leave from her trailer-trash Louisiana family and journeys uninvited and unannounced to Indiana to crash with her 38-year-old half-brother, Bill (Martin Donovan). A compassionate high school English teacher, Bill hardly deserves the intrusion of someone so vile as Dedee. Of course, Attila the Hun wouldn't deserve a relative like Dedee. Bill is gay and has a younger live-in lover named Matt (Ivan Sergei), but Bill's really still recovering from the AIDS death of Tom, his longtime companion. Dedee doesn't prove exactly sympathetic. First, she wrecks Bill's new relationship by seducing Matt. Then she convinces Matt to help her steal $10,000 from Bill. And to deter Bill from sending the authorities after her, she kidnaps Tom's urn of ashes, holds them hostage and threatens to pour them out in places far away.

What makes this zany stuff so funny is Dedee's wild mix of frankness and serpentine self-justification. In Dedee's worldview, the game is about survival, and anybody who lets you steamroll him deserves exactly what he gets. Dedee is the kind of young woman who will lie to your face and later taunt you for believing her lies. But good as Ricci is at wringing surprise laughs out of her incredible meanness, she actually has the picture stolen out from under her by Lisa Kudrow, who plays Lucia, the uptight Cassandra of the piece. Lucia is Tom's sister and Bill's high school faculty colleague and best friend. Lucia's actually in love with Bill, but she harbors no hopes of converting him to heterosexuality. Instead, she's resigned herself to life as an old maid and consoles herself with deadpan rants about the emptiness of sex. (Her tune changes when she finally has some with the local sheriff, played by Lyle Lovett). Lucia spots Dedee for a rat almost the moment they meet, but she's unable to convince anyone until it's too late. Roos has outfitted Kudrow with a score of crackerjack lines, and she knocks every one of them for a homer. The Opposite of Sex is a badly needed antidote to the typical summer fare. It's an inventively plotted picture that thrives on dialogue rather than explosions.