"Amelia"'s a real snoozer.

* * Amelia
Directed by Mira Nair. Written by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan. With Hilary Swank, Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor. (PG)

In her quest for a third Oscar, Hilary Swank dons slacks again as Amelia Earhart, with the assistance of Gateway Computers co-founder Ted Waitt, who acquired the rights to the biographies East to the Dawn by Susan Butler and The Sound of Wings by Mary Lovell. He hired Ron Bass (Rain Man) and Anna Hamilton Phelan (Gorillas in the Mist) to write the screenplay, Mira Nair to direct and assembled an all-star cast. But as the telltale credit of two editors indicates, something went wrong with Amelia.

If you want to know how Amelia Earhart got it into her head to fly a plane you'll have to look elsewhere; the movie, which begins with the run-up to her first transatlantic flight, only tells us that she was from Kansas and her father was a drunk. It's more interested in her marriage to publisher George P. Putnam (Richard Gere) and her affair with aviation magnate Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), whom we are repeatedly reminded was the father of Gore. Swank has chemistry with neither of them, nor with Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones), who mysteriously is only glimpsed from the side.

Swank gets in her Oscar-baiting speeches, but like her cultivated accent and the cockpit matte shots, they're not terribly convincing. But mostly, Amelia is just plain boring, no small accomplishment when a life was as exciting as Earhart's.

* * Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
Directed by Paul Weitz. Written by Paul Weitz and Brian Helgeland, based on the books by Darren Shan. With Chris Massoglia, John C. Reilly and Josh Hutcherson. (PG-13)

Hollywood's elusive quest for the next Harry Potter continues with Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a dramatization of the first three in a series of novels by Irish author Darren Shan, who shares an agent with J.K. Rowling. As Rowling took inspiration from her country's elite public schools, Shan transforms his country's notorious caravans of "travelers" into a freak show, but they still have a gypsy woman who sees the future. A bearded gypsy, that is.

Salma Hayek plays the gypsy, and she's joined by Willem Dafoe, Ray Stevenson, Ken Watanabe (Shan's books are big in Japan) and many other watchable actors who probably thought this job would lead to Harry Potter-size annuities. In the Voldemort role there's Michael Cerveris in a fat suit as Mr. Tiny, a supernatural puppetmaster about as scary as his name. He's trailed by a retinue of miniature Gollums and is engineering an end to the truce between the vampires, who don't kill their victims, and the vampaneze, who do. And as Larten Crepsley, the vampire in need of assistance, there's John C. Reilly, who may be the least sexy vampire since Max Schreck. But curiously for a vampire movie, sex is the farthest thing from anyone's mind. When Crepsley vamps his young charge (technically "half-vamps") it's by touching fingertips. No homoerotic overtones here.

Chris Massoglia plays Darren Shan (that's the kid's name) like he's auditioning for the Disney Channel; it's actually his best friend (Josh Hutcherson) who wants to be a vampire while, in a clever twist, Darren is actually obsessed with spiders. But the cleverness is overshadowed by the dankness of the production, in which the freaks are not Tod Browning flesh-and-blood but CGI, and a movie that was shot in Louisiana looks like it was filmed on Mars for export to Nazi Germany. There isn't one non-white student in Darren's school, and although two of the freaks are played by black actors, even Darren's romantic interest has been changed from black to white. In an eerie coincidence, Paul Weitz's brother Chris got the fall's bigger vampire picture, Twilight: New Moon, which at the very least will have Native American werewolves.

* * * 1/2 Thirst
Directed by Park Chan-wook. Written by Park Chan-wook and Chung Seo-kyung. With Song Kang-ho and Kim Ok-vin. (R)

You would think that a new film from Park Chan-wook, director of the notorious Oldboy (which is being remade by Will Smith), would have gotten a decent run. Months after its opening, Thirst finally gets a Connecticut screening, for one night only — Halloween, at Cinestudio — and you might as well leave a bowl of Snickers for the trick-or-treaters, because how many vampire priest movies are you going to see this year?

An idealistic priest who has begun to question the power of prayer, Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), choosing the path of movie monsters immemorial, enlists in a vaccine trial to eradicate a virus that once plagued Africa and is now the scourge of Asian and Caucasian males. Infected with the virus, he receives a transfusion accidentally tainted with vampire blood that works better than the vaccine, although he never gets around to telling the doctors. He's too busy getting acquainted with his sex drive, making him just the ticket out for Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), a young shopgirl who has taken to wandering the streets in a white nightie like Mina Harker. Tae-ju is trapped in a marriage to a sickly man, and if only she could get someone to kill him, preferably in a rowboat in the middle of the night ...

If that plot sounds familiar it's because it's Émile Zola's often-dramatized Thérèse Raquin, which Thirst begins to follow rather slavishly, from the mad scenes to the mother-in-law who has had a stroke and can only say j'accuse with dominoes, or in this case, mahjong tiles, As usually happens in good-vampire, bad-vampire stories, Sang-hyun soon regrets vamping Tae-ju, who relishes her new power as a psychotic killer. Park is making a point about the liberation of young women from the suffocating expectations of Korean society, a point somewhat diminished by the fanboy-pleasing casting of Kim, who is 22 but looks 13. But although Kim may be no Simone Signoret she's obviously having a blast, leaping over rooftops to tango music and tearing her victims apart.

The Dracula-meets-Double Indemnity plot causes Sang-hyun to do things because Zola's hero did them, and Park soups up the salivary slurps a bit heavy-handedly, making kissing sound just like blood-sucking. But Thirst offers its own production-design twist on the genre (missing daylight, Tae-ju has her house painted white and hung with buzzing fluorescent lights) and takes one paradox glossed over in vampire movies head-on: A vampire can only make another if the victim drinks his blood, but how can a vampire cut himself if he heals instantly? Gleefully gory and gratuitous, this is deeply pleasurable filmmaking, drenched in the blackest of humor.