When Terry Gilliam's fertile imagination is harnessed to a gold standard plot it's fired up such cinematic classics as Brazil and Twelve Monkeys.

Unfortunately, when the story doesn't pass muster, Gilliam's visual flair is left to obliterate all-comers and we're left with what amounts to a good-looking mess.

And so it proves with this overcooked adaptation of Mitch Cullin's literary collision - as Gilliam himself characterises it - of "Alice in Wonderland and Psycho".

Eleven-year-old Jeliza-Rose spends her time with her parents in a rundown apartment cooking up crack for her faded rocker dad (Jeff Bridges) and commiserating with her self-pitying mum (Jennifer Tilly).

When mom ODs on heroin, pop sweeps her off to the prairies and the ramshackle clapboard house where he was raised...and promptly joins the choir eternal after his own run-in with a dodgy batch of skag.

Faced with the brutal prospect of loneliness alongside the rotting body of her dad, Jeliza-Rose creates a fantasy world where she seeks counsel from the decapitated heads of Barbie dolls.

Reality - if you can call it that - comes in the form of neighbour Dickens (Fletcher), a mentally-damaged man with the mind of a 10-year-old and paedophilic tendencies.

He lives with his older sister Dell (McTeer), a sinister spinster in a bee-keepers' mask who makes the time pass as an amateur taxidermist.

There's a wealth of detail here - the all-angles camerawork, overdressed set, out-to-lunch characters - but very little in the way of plot.

Dickens and Dell appears to be members of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family after a stiff talking to from social services while Jeliza-Rose is not so much resilient as profoundly damaged.

It's difficult to slag off Gilliam because he is one of the few directors equipped with the talent and a visceral imagination to capture the wildest flights of fancy.

But this is far from his best work.

Tim Evans