Often, two main angles that directors take to score it big with the college crowd are to make a teen movie with boobs, butts, drugs and toilet humor, or to make a psychologically intense drama. In “The Rules of Attraction,” Roger Avary appears to shoot for the latter, but ends up somewhere closer to a dark teen movie.

“The Rules of Attraction” is sold to fans of Roger Avary’s earlier writing, as in “Killing Zoe,” and his shared part in producing and directing “Pulp Fiction.” The audience is expecting something along the lines of his long-defended cult classics but realizes by a third of the way through the movie that they are not going to witness anything on par with Avary’s past work. Instead, the vision Avary leaves us with is that of an MTV’s “Undressed” cast with characters from the WB.

The first 10 minutes of the movie actually make it seem like there will be some substance to the demented love triangle theme carried on throughout the rest of the film. Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon) narrates apathetically as she is being raped in an upstairs room of the party. Paul (Ian Somerhalder), who once dated Lauren, now gazes lovingly across the room at his love interest, Sean Bateman. James Van Der Beek stars as Bateman, the drug dealer and self-proclaimed “emotional vampire” who is in love with Lauren. The director throws in some filmmaking techniques to spruce up the party and the movie looks to have a decent start.

However, from there it rolls on a long downhill descent. The movie “rewinds” to the beginning of the semester with more of the cinematic backmasking that by this point has become overused and annoying. The love triangle of sorts is haphazardly developed with random tidbits of character development thrown in to the mix with blatant dark humor and speckles of irony.

Van Der Beek surprisingly portrays a jaded drug dealer rather well. However, he has a little bit too much fun ditching his regular “Ken doll” actor persona, and it seems that the scenes of him masturbating, taking a crap and smoking weed are just in there for his own personal enjoyment and shock value. Jessica Biel, who plays Lauren’s oversexed roommate Lara, also falls into the same sort of trap and adds little to the film other than oozing sex and drugs for the benefit of the male audience.

The body of the film has little of dramatic substance to it and seems to be a conglomeration of sex, drugs, angst-laced teen one-liners and a few bits of violence thrown in. It seems Avary lost serious focus after the first 10 minutes and gave in to selling the film more towards the teen movie stereotype than the dark cult-movie status it is made out to be. By the end of the movie when we are once again at the same party that started the movie, you can’t really feel anything for any of the characters.

Quite possibly it may leave a strange and bothersome distaste in your mind for a few hours, but other than that feeling, the movie leaves us with no great cult film vision. “The Rules of Attraction” leaves us somewhere between a dark, oversexed teen comedy and a drama with little sense of the dramatic. For drama, you’re probably better off renting “American Psycho,” and if you want college comedy, go rent “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder.” “The Rules of Attraction” is a poor synthesis.