I wonder how many people are going to walk out of Choke saying, "Well, that's not what I expected."

From the theatrical trailer, Choke looks like a Farrelly brothers take on Away From Her, with Anjelica Huston as the increasingly out-of-touch mother and that nice Sam Rockwell as a shlubby cad who's falling for his mom's doctor. There's a stripper and some mild bad behavior, but nothing you wouldn't see in an episode of How I Met Your Mother.

The red band trailer shows something just a little different. There's sex -- a lot of sex -- in barns and bathrooms, with an assortment of props (like hunting knives and ... watch the trailer). Rockwell's character is not a cad, but a full-on predator. And it looks hilarious.

Sam Rockwell plays Victor Mancini, who pays for his mother's hospital bills by pretending to choke in fancy restaurants, then leeches off the people who "save" him. By day he's the "Irish indentured servant" at a theme park that looks like Colonial Williamsburg, complete with milkmaids and town criers.

This odd concoction comes from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the modern master of the unpalatable; besides books about suicide cults, sexual abuse, and sudden infant death syndrome, he also wrote Fight Club, which, you may remember, involved turning people into soap.

Choke is only the second adaptation of one of Palahniuk's books, though he's a renowned and popular writer. (A film adaptation of Survivor, in which a plane hijacker tells his life story to the black box, was quickly dumped after 9/11.)

The black subject matter and metafiction tricks of Fight Club didn't stop it from being a critical and a (sort of) box office hit, but movie studios seem more comfortable with violence than with sex, and Choke seems like an unlikely gamble. But Palahniuk, while having an admirably depraved imagination, is also a great storyteller, and I'm glad someone took that bet.

The movie made a lot of noise at Sundance, where screenings were sold out and it won a Special Jury Prize for Work by an Ensemble Cast. Besides Rockwell and Huston, Kelly Macdonald, of Trainspotting and No Country for Old Men, and Brad William Henke, of Hollywoodland and the new Star Trek, costar.

The movie comes out September 26, when the big competition will be Eagle Eye, the Shia LaBeouf/Billy Bob Thornton vehicle that the PR guys are calling a "fast-paced race-against-time thriller." I think I've seen one of those before. I've never seen a movie about a sex-addicted historical reenactor who fakes his own near-death incidents.

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