It says something terribly sad about the derivative nature of action films that two unrelated direct-to-video features with the generic title Body Count have been released almost concurrently. And while LIVE's Body Count, originally known as Below Utopia, does feature the iconic presence of Ice-T, it is not, unfortunately, a documentary about the band behind such songs as "Evil Dick" and "KKK Bitch." It is, however, the story of an innocent young schoolteacher (Alyssa Milano) who travels with her boyfriend (Justin Theroux) over Christmas break to meet his demanding upper-class family. The dysfunctional relatives' internal squabbling is interrupted, however, when professional criminals Ice-T and Tiny "Zeus" Lister assassinate most of the boorish clan, leaving Milano and her young suitor to flee for their lives. Though it's refreshing to see the film's obnoxious family killed relatively early on, Body Count is unfortunately both a thriller that lacks suspense and a family drama that seems to have stolen most of its characters and conflicts from late-period episodes of Falcon Crest. It's far from unwatchable—the film benefits from surprisingly competent performances by most of its leads and a surprising twist ending—but Body Count is nothing to write home about. As flawed as LIVE's Body Count is, the film is a masterpiece compared to Polygram's godawful Body Count, originally titled The Split. It had the potential to be a decent film: Its cast is packed with direct-to-video all-stars (Ving Rhames, Forest Whitaker, Linda Fiorentino, David Caruso, John Leguizamo, and Donnie Wahlberg), director Robert Patton-Spruill did last year's well-received 'hood drama Squeezed, and screenwriter Theodore Witcher wrote and directed the hit Love Jones. Body Count, though, is an unmitigated disaster. Borrowing both its plot and its abundant use of fragmented flashbacks from Reservoir Dogs, it tells the story of professional criminals who rob an art museum of $15 million worth of paintings. Things go awry during the heist, however, leading to a mind-bogglingly predictable series of betrayals and seductions. The film features a slew of gifted actors, but only Rhames maintains any sense of dignity; Whitaker and Wahlberg have the good fortune to be killed early on, but Fiorentino, Caruso, and especially Leguizamo give horrendous performances. Leguizamo, a gifted performance artist and occasionally tolerable actor, has a tendency to go way over the top, and in Body Count, he delivers a performance of such surreally hammy ineptitude that it makes his similarly overwrought turns in Spawn and The Pest seem like Bressonian exercises in stoic minimalism by comparison. Of course, he is hardly the only one at fault here; it's difficult to imagine any actor accomplishing anything with Witcher's painfully derivative screenplay or Patton-Spruill's clunky, leaden direction.