Philip Ridley, who wrote the excellent screenplay for The Krays, falls from a great height here in what is presumably an attempt at a masterpiece of surrealist cinema. As if it were not enough that pretension drips from every frame, or that symbolism, most of the phallic variety, runs riot, Ridley also subjects us to: boys pumping up a frog before exploding it in fountains of blood; a man gulping down petrol before setting light to himself; a Cadillac full of perverts roaming the roads in search of small boys who seem to proliferate in this sparsely populated part of the Idaho countryside; a boy deliberately sending a woman to her death at the hands of said perverts; and the inexplicable discovery of a discarded human foetus with worms popping out of it. The sanest character on view is the local sheriff, and even he has a tin patch (a wasp got his eye), a steel hand (a turtle snapped it off) and a half-eaten ear (a dog chewed it). Among its catalogue of depravity, you might welcome the few lines of presumably unintentionally funny dialogue. `Why don't you play with your friends? ' the sheriff snarls at the boy, drawing a protesting `But they're all dead! ' `Look at this wonderful shell,' gasps the same boy, en route to wrecking a house. `Let's smash it.' Composing music for this sort of thing, which manages to be boring and repellent at the same time, can't be easy, but Nick Bicât reacts as if he were scoring a sequel to Gone With the Wind.


©ipc tx. Film content from TVTimes