Occasionally, a single line of dialogue sums up an entire movie. In Suspended Animation, a film as grisly as it is dumb, that line comes about halfway in, when protagonist Alex McArthur speaks by phone with a doctor friend. Having given the doctor an object resembling a dried prune, which he found in the secret hideaway of an acquaintance's disturbed teenage son, McArthur probably expected unpleasant results, but nothing as unpleasant as what he hears: "It's the vaginal lips of a Caucasian female." As opposed to, say, a Caucasian male? But then, by the time McArthur takes the call, nothing seems likely to shock him. The film opens during a vacation trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, during which McArthur, a high-profile animator, suffers snowmobile trouble and attempts to take refuge in the house of eccentric sisters Laura Esterman and Sage Allen. Unfazed by Allen's uncanny resemblance to Misery-era Kathy Bates, McArthur is soon drugged, gagged, and looking at mementos of past visitors to the sisters' spooky, neglected house. (They're a bit like the subjects of Grey Gardens, except that they keep pickled penises in jars.) Rescued from a grim fate, McArthur returns to Hollywood, but begins obsessing over the abduction, even tracking down the daughter Esterman gave up for adoption long ago. Instead of a psychopath, he finds lovely young Maria Cina, whose son is the psychopathic collector of vaginal lips belonging to Caucasian females. Director John Hancock got his start with the 1971 cult favorite Let's Scare Jessica To Death before going on to direct Bang The Drum Slowly and the cable-TV holiday favorite Prancer. Adapting a novel by his wife, Dorothy Tristan, Hancock attempts to return to his pre-reindeer roots, but whoever first said you can't go home again was on to something. There's not a genuine scare in the film, and Angelo Badalamenti's phoned-in score spoils the scenes that aren't already ruined by bad acting, cheap production values, ludicrous dialogue, and a tortured pace. Suspended Animation won't scare viewers to death, but it might bore them to tears.