The US Army's obsessive secrecy married to its mindnumbing incompetence has been a favourite theme of film-makers from Catch-22 to Buffalo Soldiers.

Scottish director Saul Metzstein - who scored a critical hit with Late Night Shopping - treads this well-worn path with some satirical success.

Jason Biggs exchanges the teenage high jinks of American Pie to play a reluctant grunt and victim of the familiar military administrative balls-up.

It's 1979 and he's supposed to have been seconded to Hawaii...but he finds himself dumped amid a swarm of mosquitoes in the Arctic wastes of Greenland.

With 24-hour daylight and the insistence by eccentric commanding officer Colonely Woolwrap (Northam) that he runs the base's newspaper, it's not the ideal posting.

However, his spirits are lifted by the enigmatic presence of Sgt Irene Teale (McElhone)...but complicated by the fact she's also Woolwrap's girlfriend.

Things take an even more surreal turn for the worse when he accidentally discovers a secret subterranean hospice where US casualties from the Vietnam War are being kept in a catatonic state until their deaths.

What threatens to be a clumsy combination of conspiracy thriller and military satire is rescued by the utterly surreal world where it unfolds.

The total isolation of life in a far-flung army outpost coupled with the relentless daylight conveys an atmosphere of mindbending otherworldliness.

This is a place where female GIs strip down to their stars'n'stripes undies for an outdoor disco in the snow and the entertainments officer will only show Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

As a subversive study of army dirty tricks, it is less successful but still keeps the attention by virtue of its focus on a community of men and women just the right side of sanity.

As someone once put it of the US military - Situation Normal All F****d Up.

Tim Evans