The craft of Nicolas Cage is unparalleled in the acting world. He can replace dialogue with improvised grunts, inappropriately shout "OOPS!" while telling a stranger that his wife and daughter are dead, gyrate profanely in a water hose shower while standing next to a motorcycle, gesture wildly for rhythmic effect, and unintelligibly mutter lines between violent drunken sobs to convey emotion. Watching him act is like watching someone with Tourette's - except that everything he says and does is done with such premeditated confidence and charisma that the viewer can only witness the madness in a state of awe.

What's perhaps more astounding about a film like "Between Worlds" is that we're talking about a FILM here. This is not a live performance or a solo act. Cage doesn't work alone, he's not the director, and of course there are other actors for him to interact with as well. There is a story here too, although it's so whacked-out and nonsensical that Cage is essentially given free rein to dominate the film with his unique presence and transform it into a performance piece that hijacks the viewer's sanity, possibly in an attempt to send them out to the nearest water hose to unleash their own inner demons.

Speaking of demons, there are a lot of them on display in "Between Worlds." Director/writer/producer Maria Pulera takes more than a few cues from David Lynch here, starting with the use of music by Angelo Badalamenti (Lynch's favorite composer), and continuing with references to "Twin Peaks" and, more overtly, "Lost Highway." Cage plays a broken-down, dirty and perpetually drunk truck driver named Joe, who gallantly attempts to save a maiden in distress when he finds her being attacked by her boyfriend in a truck stop bathroom. Little does he know, the woman (Franka Potente of "Run Lola Run" fame) has had clairvoyant powers obtained from a childhood accident which can keep her comatose daughter from going to the other side - but only if she can get someone to help her unlock the magical power by strangling her. I hope you're following this so far.

Then we have her daughter (Penelope Mitchell), whose body has been inhabited by the ghost of Joe's dead wife, who died tragically in a fire. Without giving anything away, let's just say the fire motif eventually comes back with a vengeance in the film's climax in a way that absolutely has to be seen to be believed. Predictably, Joe and his wife become reunited, but not before he and her mother have joined together in their an unholy tryst of their own. It's a love triangle from hell that you can see coming from a mile away, but what's more difficult to predict are the frequent sex scenes between Cage's fat bastard truck driver and his female co-stars. In fact, there's so much awkward, dirty sex that the film veers dangerously into soft-core trucker porn territory. But while the sex may be sleazy and frequent, each individual sex scene is unique and notable. The scene in which Joe reads aloud from a handwritten notebook of poetry entitled "Memories by Nicolas Cage" while shots from the present are interspersed with flashbacks to him and his wife having sex in what appears to be a private room in a strip club was a particular favorite.

The bottom line: Nicolas Cage films are never for the faint of heart. Even in Oscar-nominated performances such as "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Adaptation," he straddled the line between good and bad acting to the point that he transcended any judgement of quality and achieved a level of acting that can only be experienced, not judged. "Between Worlds," with its half-baked Lynchian pretensions and soft-core perversions, never had a chance of making it to the Oscars. But Cage has been past Oscar aspirations for years now. He's in a class of his own, with nothing to prove but his loyalty to his own singular craft. And for a director like Maria Pulera, clearly trying to push the envelope and show audiences something they've never seen before, Nicolas Cage's unique brand of weirdness is just what the doctor ordered. If you really cared about the Oscars, you wouldn't be watching a movie like this anyway.