Even when it's carried off with some visual style, as it is in Robinson Devor's first feature, "The Woman Chaser," film-noir parody tends to feel stale and rehashed.

The Woman Chaser is a 1999 film by director Robinson Devor, starring Patrick Warburton.

The Woman Chaser (1999)

"The Woman Chaser" was shown as part of last year's New York Film Festival.

"The Woman Chaser" is set in 1950's Los Angeles, where Richard moves from San Francisco and immediately sets up a business as a shady used-car dealer.

"The Woman Chaser" strives desperately for a zaniness that is largely absent from the screenplay and from comic performances that are too blank and unfocused to register as parody.

Mr. Warburton plays a very different character in "The Woman Chaser," an independent feature adapted by the first-time filmmaker Robinson Devor from a neglected pulp novel by Charles Willeford.

As he showed in his only other feature, his underrated adaptation of the Charles Willeford novel "The Woman Chaser," Mr. Devor likes to find the uncomfortable, sometimes rough edges of a situation and gently rub against them.

The Woman Chaser (1960), he writes, features a "structural self-consciousness [that] prefigures subsequent post-modernist texts."