By SCOTT A. MAY High expectations fall with a resounding thud in "Choke," the first big disappointment of the fall season. Gag is more like it. Sam Rockwell stars as Victor, a weary complainer stuck in a dead- end job as an underpaid re-enactor at a Colonial-era theme park.

By Stephen Holden Choke Directed by Clark Gregg * Reviewed by Stephen Holden * To visit the absurdist world of "Choke," the second film adapted from a novel by the "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk, requires that you dive through the looking glass into a labyrinth where personal identity is fluid.

By John Beifuss "Choke" is the story of a depressed, smart-aleck sex addict (Sam Rockwell) who works as a costumed "historical interpreter" for tourists in a recreated colonial village when he's not visiting his insane, dying mother (Anjelica Huston); staging fake near-death experiences at restaurants to scam money from patrons who "save" him with the Heimlich maneuver; and wondering whether he really could be a clone generated from a particularly intimate anatomical relic of Jesus Christ.

By JEFF SIMON Chuck Palahniuk novels were written to be made into movies. That's true no matter how transgressive they are. We discovered that when one of them turned into David Fincher's "Fight Club" in 1999, one of the visionary masterpieces of movies in the past decade.

By Jeff Vice Deseret News CHOKE -- ** 1/2 -- Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald; rated R (vulgarity, sex, profanity, nudity, slurs, brief drugs, violence) "Choke" is sick, twisted, perverted, irreverent, sacrilegious, distasteful and possibly every thing else under the sun you can think of to describe the film.