Death would be a release for everyone - the audience included - in this funereally-paced comedy set in a Jewish retirement home.

Newcomer Leyland O'Brien plays Keith, a half black, half Jewish teenager who runs the Paradise Grove rest home with his mother (Lenska) in north London.

While mum knocks back the booze and indulges in the odd knee-trembler with the local doctor, Keith handles the day-to-day running of God's waiting room.

Among the residents is his grandfather Izzie (Moody), an irascible former lingerie salesman constantly narked by the fact his grandson is both black and uncircumcised.

With the arrival of mysterious rest-home help Kim (Blakemore) the virginal Keith's world is shaken with the possibility of nookie and, maybe, love.

Wearing its Jewish credentials proudly on its chest, this promises much but doesn't deliver. Comparisons with Woody Allen are redundant.

Director Charles Harris seems to have no concept of narrative structure with the dynamics of the plot creaking along like an old zimmer frame.

The humour is laboured and crude and seems to draw its inspiration from Seventies sitcoms that happily now lie dead and buried.

Moody - who most people will remember for his Oscar nominated turn as Fagin in Oliver - manfully struggles with a script that doesn't do him any favours.

Lenska fares better but Blakemore's bizarre character - a teenage runaway whose father is a government hitman - just doesn't work.

At best, the movie is patronising to the old dears counting out their final days - there seem to be more vegetables in Paradise Grove than your average allotment.

When the final credits roll you feel you've aged five years.

Tim Evans