It is a decidedly cult picture with a grandly bare bones and highly minimalistic performance from star Maude Adams, ending with an unnerving stroll through a supermarket that’s completely unforgettable. But it is also a campy, over-the-top riot, so much of the innuendo and melodrama so thickly spread on the movie is near impossible to take seriously.

Obviously, screenwriter Paul Rudnick, director Frank Oz and producer Scott Rudin, the team responsible for the gay-bending farce “In & Out,” feel the same way towards the material, choosing to turn “The Stepford Wives” into an all-out comedy, replacing the melodrama and horrific foreboding with satire pointed directly at our own consumerist culture. And while their take on Levin’s iconoclastic novel is undeniably funny, it doesn’t carry the emotional heft or horrific weight of either the book or the original movie. It is a mixed bag of hilarity and confusion, a disjointed mess held together only by the iron grip of a superstar cast so talented they could make even a commercial for tax audits a giggle-happy riot.

When Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman) is fired from her job as president of EBS television, her life falls down upon her ears is crashing cacophony of a histrionic nervous breakdown. Her nebbish husband Walter (Matthew Broderick), whom quits his job as a junior vice-president at EBS in protest, takes it upon himself to move his wife and family into the Connecticut countryside to rebuild, choosing the Mabary-like Stepford as their new home.

But something strange is going on in Stepford or, more exactly, something strange is happening to the women of Stepford. They’re all life-size Barbie Dolls like Sarah Sunderson (Faith Hill), perfectly coifed and made up with features and bosoms more plastic than human. Not only that, they are all Martha Stewart-y domestic goddesses, single-handedly taking care of the massive McMansions, raising the kids, cooking deluxe gourmet meals and providing their men with sex so good you’d think they were porn stars. They’re subservient beauty queens, reveling in their second-class status and doing all that’s in their power to be the effervescently beautiful trophy wives their unquestionably nerdy husbands apparently long for them to be. It’s inhuman, and something is going on that Joanna can’t quite put her finger on, but she’s sure as heck going to find out.

Of course, unless you’ve been living in a cave you already know what is going on inside Stepford. Levin’s concept of a ‘Stepford Wife’ has entered the public lexicon, the image of the over-bleached sexpot whose only thought in life is to please her man is the fantasy for more guys than I care to imagine. Oz and Rudnick take that fantasy to the extreme, skewering suburban perfectionism with all the subtlety of a knife slashed against the jugular. Taking shots at our current obsession with makeovers, the duo revel in the absurdity of Stepford, gleefully mixing nerd and beauty queen to create a picture of America so subversively natural it feels almost lived-in.

Helping them out is a who’s-who of comedic talent. Bette Midler has her best role in ages as Joanna’s first friend in Stepford, Jewish feminist (and apparently anti-house cleaning) writer Bobbie Markowitz. Caustic, witty and fearless in the face of things she doesn’t understand, Bobbie is a bristling counterpoint to all the feminine perfection surrounding her. Even better is Glenn Close as Claire Wellington, seemingly the head fembot of Stepford, who runs her own exercise class called ‘Claireobics’ where all the woman come to workout in form-fitting floral print dresses and patent leather high heels. Close is hysterical, playing her character so close to the vest that when the ultimate surprise (even if it isn’t much of a surprise) finally comes the actress comes to life with a potently evil sizzle and snap.

Christopher Walked has a few nice moments as the mysterious head of the Stepford Men’s Association, as does Jon Lovitz as Bobbie’s exasperated husband Dave. I also adored Roger Bart playing Rudnick’s biggest addition to the Stepford mythology, gay architect Roger Bannister. He’s simply wonderful and shares an enthusiastically exuberant chemistry with both Midler and Kidman. He and his partner are a wonderful new piece to the world of Stepford, their quest for perfection just as important and valid as everyone else’s and, in the end, just as doomed for assimilation.

Yet, for all the laughs something is off. “The Stepford Wives” moves more as a series of silly vignettes than as a motion picture, and the central love affair between Joanna and Walter isn’t even remotely believable. This wouldn’t be so bad if the film didn’t rely so heavily on our believing in their love, that the time spent in Stepford has in fact brought them back closer together than ever before. Even more, this time out the filmmakers don’t have the courage to take the material into the darker nether regions the original did, refusing to go out on the mysteriously masochistic note both the novel and the 1975 movie conclude on.