Parky at the Pictures (DVD 30/3/2017)

On arriving home, however, Seok-woo learns from his mother (Lee Joo-sil) that Su-an is feeling low after forgetting the words to her song at the school concert. He tries to cheer his daughter up with her birthday present, but he bought her a Wii for Children's Day and, in order to atone, he agrees to accompany her to Busan the next day. Left alone, he watches the camcorder footage of Su-an's performance and is stung by the reproachful look she shoots the lens.

Early the following mornng, Seok-woo and Su-an board the KTX high-speed train to Busan. As the captain (Jung Suk-yong) climbs into his cab, conductor Ki-chul (Jang Hyuk-jin) and his staff welcome the passengers to their seats. However, they are too preoccupied to see a homeless man (Choi Gwi-hwa) and a distressed young woman (Shim Eun-kyung) burst through the doors before they close. Thus, no one hears the hobo whispering about everyone being dead or sees the runaway writhing in the corridor clutching a leg wound before falling momentarily still and contorting back to zombified life.

Sniffing the air and snarling, she charges into the nearest compartment and buries her teeth into a defenceless stewardess. Once infected, she also turns and, within seconds, dozens of ravenous ghouls are rampaging through the carriages and only a few members of a high-school baseball team manage to escape, including Yong-guk (Choi Woo-sik) and cheerleader Jin-hee (Ahn So-hee), who has an unrequited crush on him. Also spared are ageing sisters In-gil (Ye Soo-jung) and Jong-gil (Park Myung-sin), self-important transport executive Yong-suk (Kim Eui-sung) and chip-shouldered working stiff Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok) and his heavily pregnant wife, Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-mi), who is using the lavatory when the mayhem begins. Hearing the commotion, Su-an slips away from her distracted father and sees the wailing horde shuffling towards their carriage. She is swept to safety by Sang-hwa, who tries to hold the door closed against the revenants. However, Seok-woo realises that they don't have the intelligence to open the door and suggests that they will stop clamouring if they cover the glass with wet newspaper because zombies only respond to what their enfeebled eyes can see. Seong-kyeong blocks them off and silence reigns. But Yong-suk has been watching the TV news and tries to establish himself as the leader of the survivors with the aid of the conductor. He informs them that Daejeon has been placed under military quarantine and that they should be safe once the train stops. However, Seok-woo is in no mood to listen because he has just heard his mother being attacked by the zombies while saying her farewells down the phone.

Seok-woo dislikes Yong-suk as much as Sang-hwa bears a grudge against him. So, he calls his army buddy to see what is going on in the city and is advised to go to east rather than follow directions to the main square. When the train stops in the deserted station, the captain is uncertain what to do for the best. But Yong-suk leads everyone up the escalator, while the zombified passengers in the other compartments press hungrily and helplessly against the windows as they pass.

When they reach the concourse, Seok-woo guides Su-an to one side and she is puzzled why he is breaking away from the group. He tells her that they will be safer this way and she accuses him of putting himself before everyone else and bawls that her mother had been right to leave him. She pulls away from him and rejoins the throng desperately trying to get back on the train after encountering a battalion of voracious soldiers guarding the entrance. Seong-kyeong grabs Su-an's hand as they run and Seok-woo only just manages to get through the glass door being held shut by Sang-hwa and the last three baseballers.

Somehow, they succeed in bolting the doors and wedging bats through the handles. But, as they pelt towards the platform, the glass shatters and the zombie troops tumble through. Young-guk alone makes it back to the train, as his teammates are savaged. But, when he calls Jin-hee to assure her that he is safe, along with Seok-woo and Sang-haw, Yong-suk convinces the others that they have been bitten and are trying to trick them into letting them into the last safe compartment on the train.

As the captain calls control for advice and is urged to get to Busan before the plague hits the city, Sang-hwa gets a call from Seong-kyeong to say she is trapped in a bathroom with Su-an. Determined to rescue them, Seok-woo and Sang-hwa persuade Young-guk to bind their arms with gaffer tape and tool themselves up to battle through the carriages separating them from their loved ones. They bludgeon their way through the first compartment, but discover in the second that the zombies are disorientated by tunnel darkness and they are able to pick their way through the seats before sending them careering to the wrong end of the corridor by setting off Sang-hwa's mobile phone.

They free Seong-kyeong and Su-an and wait between compartments for a tunnel before proceeding further. However, the zombies block the aisle and they have to crawl along the overhead luggage racks to reach sanctuary. On knocking on the carriage door, however, Yong-suk browbeats Ki-chul into keeping it shut. As Sang-hwa holds back the zombies from a partially closed door, Seok-woo and Young-guk try to smash their way into the safe zone and Seok-woo finally comes to admire Sang-hwa when he uses his failing energy to protect them after he is bitten on the hand. He begs Seok-woo to look after Seong-kyeong and Seok-woo nods his assent before rejoining Young-guk.

As they break through, however, Sang-hwa is overpowered and In-gil sacrifices herself so that Seok-woo, Young-guk, Seong-kyeong and Su-an can enter. No sooner are they in the carriage, however, than Yong-suk whips his fellow survivors into a paranoid frenzy. Seok-woo punches him for wasting lives, but Yong-suk retaliates by suggesting that Seok-woo has been infected by his blood-spattered shirt and they demand that the newcomers are isolated. Jin-hee and the homeless man readily join them to get away from Yong-suk's baying acolytes. But Jong-gil is so furious with them for demeaning her sister's sacrifice that she gazes into her clouded eyes at the door and opens it so that the zombies can feast on the self-centred fools. But Yong-suk and Ki-chul manage to shelter in a toilet, while Seok-woo's party take stock in the vestibule.

While he stares out of the window, Seok-woo gets a call from his assistant. He reassures him that Busan is safe, but breaks down on revealing that one of the companies they represent was responsible for the chemical leak that has unleashed the chaos. Seok-woo tells him not to blame himself and crouches down beside Su-an to check she is bearing up. But any hopes that the worst might be over are quickly dashed when the captain announces over the tannoy that a train has derailed at East Daegu and that they are going to have to disembark and try to find another locomotive.

Stopping outside the station, the captain descends from his cab and creeps along the empty platforms. A couple of trains are packed with frustrated zombies, but he manages to find a working engine and slowly edges out into the open. Seok-woo, Su-an, Seong-kyeong and the homeless man climb down and make their way along the track. At that moment, a flaming train ploughs into the platform and a spinning carriage nearly crushes the fugitive quartet. Although Seok-woo is knocked cold.

Meanwhile, Young-guk and Jin-hee take a different route and jump aboard a stationary service to weigh up their options. However, they run into Yong-suk, who has already fed Ki-chul to the stragglers outside the bathroom to create a diversion and he has no compunction about using Jin-hee as a decoy to make good his escape across the track to the moving loco. Heartbroken at seeing the girl of his dreams suffering, Young-guk gives up the ghost and allows her to devour him.

Having witnessed the collision, the captain slows the train to look for survivors. He sees Yong-suk running towards him and courageously jumps down from the foot plate to assist him. However, Yong-suk has no intention of returning the favour and he races after the engine, just as Seok-woo regains consciousness. He slips through a gap beneath the derailed carriage and is about to reach for Su-an when the rolling stock shifts and he has to draw on all his strength to remove a piece of twisted metal to save Su-an and Seong-kyeong. Hearing the glass holding back the trapped zombies, the homeless man motions for them to go without him and he holds back the flesh-eating tide long enough for the trio to flee.

They chase after the engine and clamber aboard. The pursuing zombies grab hold of the railings and act in concert go form a giant undead brake. But Seok-woo tramples on their fingers and they are left in a heap on the track. Unfortunately, they are still not safe, as Yong-suk has been bitten and he emerges from the cab to plead with Seok-woo to get him home to his mother. They fight on the walkway and Seok-woo manages to throw him overboard. But he is wounded in the process and he tells a bereft Su-an to stay close to Seong-kyeong before making his way to the back of the engine. As his eyes mist over, he thinks back to holding his daughter in his arms for the first time and he smiles before his shadow is seen leaping into oblivion in a noble act of self-sacrifice.

At the end of the line, Seong-kyeong and Su-an stop the train and wander towards a tunnel through a scene of utter devastation. They are spotted by a couple of soldiers in a machine-gun nest, who can't make out whether they are human or not. Their commander orders them to shoot over his walkie-talkie, but the sniper pauses when he hears Su-an singing the song she had rehearsed for the concert and her voice rings out bravely as she finally reaches Busan.

As is clear from the synopsis, this is a breakneck ride and Yeon Sang-ho stages the action with an innovative panache that has recently eluded so many K- and J-horror directors, as well as their American counterparts. But, while the set-pieces are cannily handled (particularly when the massed ranks are swarming), it's the ingenuity of Yeon and Park Joo-suk's screenplay that ensures this remains tense and startling.

Credit should also go to cinematographer Lee Hyung-deok for making the most of the confined spaces, as well as editor Yang Jin-mo, make-up artists Kwak Tae-yong and Hwang Hyo-kyun, and the fine ensemble led by Gong Yoo (who regains his humanity in losing his life) and Kim Su-an, who switches from sulky contempt to childlike curiosity and hysterical misery with great conviction for one so young. Even Kim Eui-sang merits a mention for playing the caricatured fat cat villain with such hissable relish. One can only hope that the seemingly inevitable Hollywood remake combines suspense, pathos, gore and bleak comedy with the same finesse.

Having come to prominence in Gareth Evans's The Raid (2011) and its 2014 sequel, Iko Uwais teams with Indonesian directors Timo Tjahjanto and Kimo Stamboel on Headshot. Known as The Mo Brothers, the directors are best known for horror outings like Macabre (2009) and Killers (2014). But Tjahjanto shows a flair for the silat style of martial arts in the action sequences he choreographed with Uwais, who cult stock can only rise with this combustible blend of flying fists and fizzing bullets that becomes increasingly detached from reality with each delirious showdown.

The picture gets off to an explosive start as criminal mastermind Lee (Sunny Pang) blasts his way out of a maximum security island prison. He lets his fellow inmates do much of the heavy lifting and, having snapped the jaw of the governor and crushed the skull of the sole surviving guard after a ferocious fire fight, Lee strolls to freedom, just as a stranger (Iko Uwais) washes up on a nearby beach and is taken to the nearest hospital by fisherman Romli (Epy Kusnandar). Two months later, the castaway comes round as medical student Ailin (Chelsea Islan) keeps vigil in his room and, because he has amnesia, he adopts the name Ishmael that she had given him while reading Moby Dick.

As Ailin runs tests, Ishmael has vague flashbacks involving a woman and a gun. But he remembers nothing about his past, even though his body is covered in scars from the wounds Ailin had treated. But, as he gazes out to see, it's made clear that he has a connection with Lee by an abrupt cut that sees the mobster pay a visit on a rival boss Anto (Egi Fedley) who is furious with him for selling diluted cocaine and cheap Chinese firearms. However, aided by his trusty sidekick, Rika (Julie Estelle), he dispatches his foe's henchmen and kills Anto by jamming a pair of chopsticks into his neck. As back-ups Tano (Zack Lee), Tejo (David Hendrawan) and Besi (Very Tri Yulisman) burst into the warehouse, Lee decides to spare second-in-command Bondhi (Ganindra Bimo) as he has information about Ishmael. But he shoots off the top of his ear to remind him where his loyalties now lie.

Seeking treatment from Ailin, Bondhi asks after her patient and he is about to turn nasty when Ishmael leaps to her rescue and sends him packing after a brief skirmish. He confides that he is worried he is not a nice person and Ailin assures him that he is fine, but does need to go to Jakarta for a delicate operation to remove fragments of metal from his skull. Acknowledging the gravity of his condition, Ishmael is prompted by another hazy flashback into promising to go to the capital as soon he has found out who he is. He puts Ailin on the bus, but overhears shooting when she calls him during a bloody hijack that results in Ailin and a small girl, Mina (Avrilla Sigarlaki), being taken hostage.

Chancing upon the bus while returning to the beach hut on Romli's scooter, Ishmael finds Ailin's glasses and has to fend off two minions sent to torch the vehicle. But, having pushed an empty shell casing into the eye of the second thug, Ishmael runs into several more outside and, even though he sets one alight, he is knocked unconscious while tending to Romli, who has been fatally wounded while trying to help him. When he wakes, he is in a police station, where an Interpol agent (Rifnu Wikana) reveals that his real name is Abdi and that he is one of the gang of kidnapped children that Lee has turned into killing machines to do his bidding. But Abdi had betrayed Lee to the cops and he had been arrested at an outdoor restaurant.

Just as Ishmael/Abdi asks for further clarification, the lights go out and Tano and Tejo (who have bumped off Bondhi for talking too much) gun down everyone on duty. As the detective is macheted through the neck via his office window, Ishmael deals with the first wave of heavies before a desktop joust and a duel armed a guillotine blade and a typewriter account for Tejo and Tano. Gazing at his bloodied hands, Ishmael ponders on his instinctive flair for violent survival as a mobile phone rings. Picking up, he hears Lee menacing Ailin, who tries to defend herself by stabbing him with some scissors. But Lee is waiting (staring at the broken blade of a ceremonial sword), as Ishmael rides across the island on a motorbike.

Arriving in a woodland clearing, Ishmael finds the well in which Lee dumped his victims and let them slug it out so that only the fittest survived. Armed with a metal truncheon, Besi asks if Ishmael recalls the suffering they endured to earn Lee's trust. He offers to let his `brother' walk away if he forgets about Ailin. But Ishmael leaps into action and a savage onslaught ensues that ends with Besi staggering to the beach to die from a blow to the head. Ishmael's chance to draw breath proves short-lived, however, as Rika appears to discard her jacket and fight in a tight black vest in the tideline. She is jealous of Ailin and curses Ishmael for forgetting how close they had once been. But he has an image of her pointing a gun at him and he remembers that she shot him and caused him to fall off a pier before slinging her dislodged knife into her guts as she reaches down for a pistol in a boot holster.

Feeling remorse for killing his childhood playmate, Ishmael goes in search of Lee, who has sent one of his guards to fetch Ailin. She gives as good as she gets, however, and discovers a talent for firing a machine gun that gets her into the basement corridor just as Ishmael battles his way through Lee's rearguard. Ailin is terrified to see him, as she suspects he is still loyal to his `father'. But he begs her to save him a second time and is about to lead her and Mina to safety when Lee hurls himself at him for his treachery. They trade pitiless blows in a concrete room and Lee looks to have the upper hand until a blow to the face stuns him and Ishmael is able to release a torrent of punches that leave the older man stunned on the ground.

However, he bolts through the nearest door and pounces on Ishmael when he charges after him. Once again, Lee seems to have stolen the march. But Ishmael drives him back and impales him on a sharp branch jutting out from a felled tree and Ailin rushes out to pull Ishmael to safety as Lee tries to pull his throat towards the spike. As the film ends, Ailin resists putting a name on the patient board and smiles with gratitude as her beau comes round from the operation to remove the metal from his head.

Dripping backstory through jagged fragments of flashback, the Mo Brothers strive to put a veneer of complexity on this all-action thriller. But, while subtlety remains in short supply from the first frames, there can be no doubting the sophistication of the fight choreography, which is ably abetted by the dizzying camerawork of Yunus Pasolang and the restrained editing of Arifin Cuunk, who resists the temptation du jour to slice and dice the close combat images into obfuscatory splinters. With Aria Prayogi and Fajar Yuskemal's score providing suitably muscular accompaniment to the slo-mo facial distortions and blood spurts, Uwais, Pang, Estelle and Yulisman throw themselves into the scraps with a brio that gives this a rougher edge than many martial arts and Heroic Bloodshed movies from Hong Kong.

Obviously belief has to be suspended along the way, as Uwais seems pretty much indestructible. He also wins the heart of Chelsea Islan with a ridiculous ease that is matched by her gun-toting tenacity, which emerges from nowhere in the bowels of the bunker. But the biggest flaw in the scenario is the flimsiness of Sunny Pang 's cultish infamy and the fact that he disappears for large parts of the picture while Uwais deals with his onetime pals. It's par for the course for the villain to be a peripheral figure until the climactic encounter, but when the hero is a closed book and the sidekicks are so sketchily drawn, Tjahjanto might have worked harder at making Pang more of a sardonically cunning or lethally wicked foe.

By far the weakest of the week's DVD releases is The White King, the writer-directorial debut of the husband-and-wife team of Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht. Despite borrowing liberally from George Orwell's 1984 and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, the scenario is based on a 2005 novel by György Dragomán, who left Romania for his ancestral Hungary as a teenager and drew on his own experiences of the Ceausescu era for a dystopic saga that has been translated into several languages However, Tittel and Helfrecht dispense with narrative context after an abrasive animated credit sequence depicting the toppling of the urban élite by a rural revolution that some might compare with the groundswell in America that brought Donald Trump to power. But the seemingly authoritarian regime's ideology and methodology are left entirely to the audience's imagination, while the absence of backstory means that the characters are merely ciphers who are manipulated to serve a plot that is little more than a series of isolated incidents that are so loosely linked that they lack any form of coherence or dramatic tension. During an idyllic lakeside picnic with parents Ross Partridge and Agyness Deyn, 12 year-old Lorenzo Allchurch plays chess and has a kickabout before his father tells him about the treasure buried beneath the towering statue of Young Hank Lumber, the farm boy founder of The Homeland, which is about to celebrate its 30th anniversary. However, as they wander back to their humble home, Derek de Lint arrests Partridge for speaking out against the state and he is taken to a prison camp, in spite of the fact that parents Jonathan Pryce and Fiona Shaw are respected members of the establishment.

Under the constant gaze of surveillance cameras, Deyn works nights in an unspecified job, while Allchurch attends a school that is run with an iron fist by Ton Kas. He punishes Allchurch for stealing the campus flag (with its pitchfork insignia) and makes him wear a sign denoting him as a thief during the 30th anniversary parade that culminates in a military fly past. That night, De Lint comes to ask Deyn why she failed to attend the event and delights in informing Allchurch that Partridge is in a gulag rather than working for the government, as his mother had led him to believe. He is furious with Deyn for treating him like a child and insists on accepting a birthday invitation from his grandparents, who despise Deyn for coming from a family of undesirables.

Price collects Allchurch in his car and gives him a pistol for his present. He takes him into the garden to practice shooting and urges him to aim at a grey cat that has wandered on to his property. Allchurch is reluctant to take a life, but Shaw insists that he shows some mettle and the boy appears to take quiet satisfaction from conquering his fears. However, he upsets his grandmother by mentioning Partridge's plight and Pryce tries to smooth things over by giving Allchurch one of the medals his father won en route to becoming an army hero. But Deyn is angry with him for accepting something from her detested in-laws and they argue about them trying to brainwash her son.

The following day, Allchurch and his black pal Malachi Hallett are ambushed by renegade twins Jeffrey and Matthew Postlethwaite, who steal the football that Partridge had given Allchurch and he takes a beating in trying to protect it. He makes light of his injuries, but is hurt when Hallett's parents, Adebayo Bolaji and Clare-Hope Ashitey, refuses to let Deyn shop in their store because of Partridge's disgrace. Allchurch snubs him as he calls down from the roof (sitting pointedly next to the `LIES' part of the `SUPPLIES' sign), but his gang reunites in time to attack the tower where the Postlethwaites are hiding out in order to retrieve the ball. Enduring a stabscotch ordeal, Allchurch turns the knife on his tormentor and escapes as the surviving sibling shoots flaming arrows at him and sets light to the haystacks in a nearby field.

Frustrated because Pryce won't help her find Partridge and secure his release, Deyn puts on her best dress and goes to see General Greta Scacchi in her plush headquarters. Left to his own devices while they talk, Allchurch discovers a room with a screen depicting bustling urban life and an automaton (voiced by Olivia Williams) who invites him to play chess. But he is distracted by the sound of Deyn and Scacchi arguing and he pulls his mother into the rain to prevent her from getting into any trouble for daring to question the regime's right to imprison subversives.

Determined to help Deyn, Allchurch persuades Hallett to go in search of the cave beneath the Lumber statue. Once inside, however, they discover nothing but rubble and the disappointed Hallett leaves his friend after he falls from a ledge. He is rescued by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, the blind guardian of a site filled with dirty little secrets (although the dim lighting, jittery camera sweeps and obfuscatory cutting prevent the viewer from readily understanding what these might be), who gives the boy a mug of tea and warns him that everyone must make sacrifices for what they believe in before returning him to the woods.

Pryce is furious with Allchurch for wandering off without telling Deyn. But he is also relieved and joins in their reunion hug. However, he promptly suffers a heart attack and Allchurch finds himself at the funeral, listening to Shaw eulogising about his military achievements in service of The Homeland. She is halted when the chapel doors open and a disoriented Partridge staggers towards the coffin. He is permitted a brief exchange with Deyn and Allchurch before being bundled back into an armoured truck. But Deyn grabs a handy bicycle and pursues the vehicle with her son running alongside her, as Shaw is left humiliated on the dais as the remainder of the congregation ignore her bid to sing the national anthem.

This resoundingly melodramatic and decidedly anticlimactic denouement rather sums up a picture that lacks the budget and the directorial flair to match Helfrecht and Tittel's undoubted and laudable ambition. But one only has to compare this muddled amalgam of clichés and caricatures to Brady Corbet's The Childhood of a Leader (2015) to see how far they have fallen short. Trivialising the themes of Dragomán's text, the writing is particularly weak, with the refusal to explain any facet of the story world ensuring that the episodes stubbornly refuse to coalesce into any sort of coherent narrative. Moreover, actors of the calibre of Pryce and Shaw are stymied by the lumpen dialogue, the shallowness of the character depth and the dubious decision to combine Hungarian settings with American accents.

Carrying the enterprise on his young shoulders, Lorenzo Allchurch gives a creditably spirited performance. But his plucky resistance largely rings hollow because Tittel and Helfrecht fail to generate any sense of oppression or dread. Production designer Richard Bullock litters the sets with propagandist slogans and bits of fascistic iconography. But, despite René Richter making effective widescreen use of the rustic landscape, there is little palpable menace following the opening animation (provided by the London-based digital design house, Spov), whose sense of folksy bombast is neatly reinforced by the score composed by Agnès Varda regular, Joanna Bruzdowicz. Helfrecht and Tittel deserve credit for dedicating four years to getting the film made. They show promise in places, but they have much to take onboard before they embark upon their next venture.

Newcomer Paul Foott makes a fine impression with The Young Offenders, a rite of scally passage that draws on Ireland's biggest ever drugs haul (when a record €440m-worth of cocaine was seized off the West Cork coast in 2007) to put a mischievous spin on an Enid Blyton-style scenario about cycling through the countryside in search of adventure. Instead of lashings of ginger beer, however, 15 year-old wastrels Chris Walley and Alex Murphy hope to celebrate the recovery of a bale of washed-up contraband with topless models and an English butler in a luxury mansion.

Bicycle thief Chris Walley is something of a cult hero in his working-class district of Cork. Wearing a hoodie and a mask that makes him look like local thug Shane Casey, he leads Garda sergeant Dominic MacHale on a merry dance through the streets, even pausing to kiss a female fan before taunting his pursuer with a wheelie before disappearing into the English Market. Best pal Alex Murphy idolises Walley, despite the fact his plain-speaking fishmonger mother, Hilary Rose, thinks he's an eejit who fails to understand when she insults him and who sets the impressionable Murphy a bad example.

Busting moves as they wander along in their identical individuality, Walley and Murphy are currently on easy street because Casey has been jailed for possessing cannabis plants after MacHale got a warrant while looking for the police bike that Walley had stolen. They fantasise about living in large on a million euros, as life has not been easy since Murphy's builder father was killed by a falling hammer and Walley lost his mother and began a battle to hide his ill-gotten gains from his abusive alcoholic father, Michael Sands. But Walley gets an idea how to change things while watching a news report about some missing bales of cocaine after customs officers impounded a trawler at Three Castle Head.

Murphy likes the idea of €7 million, but doesn't fancy cycling 100 miles across Munster, especially as he has promised Rose he will mind the stall while she has a troublesome tooth pulled. But they argue after she serves up another burnt offering and he meets up with Walley at the docks the following morning for the adventure of a lifetime. They fail to notice, however, that MacHale (who keeps ignoring superintendant Ciaran Bermingham's orders to do some proper policing) has fitted a tracking device to the mountain bike that Walley has stolen for himself (while getting a flowery yellow girls' cycle with a basket for Murphy) and he tags along behind them, as their progress is measured in animated form on a facsimile of the map that Walley pilfered from the corner shop.

Seemingly nothing can stop them, until Murphy gets saddle sore after a couple of miles and needs to have a swim to wash his tackle after he cools it down with a sticky ice lolly. They are prevented from breaking their legs by leaping into a shallow quay by fisherman Wesley O'Duinn and Murphy teaches Walley how to swim before they resume their journey. However, they realise that MacHale is following them and, when he stops at a café, Walley dons his Casey mask in a bid to reason with him in the way that Al Pacino and Robert De Niro squared off in Michael Mann's Heat (1995). But MacHale is evidently not a movie fan (even though he mimics Jack Nicholson trying to get through the bathroom door in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, 1980) and tries to arrest Walley, who escapes by the seat of his tracksuit trousers.

They are given sanctuary by farmer Pascal Scott, who sends MacHale packing with a flea in his ear before dispatching the boys into the yard to kill a chicken for supper. Murphy is partial to poultry, but he can't bring himself to break the neck of a bird who looks as confused as he does. Scott has no such qualms, however, and the lads are plucking feathers when they spot the tracking device under Walley's saddle. They consign MacHale to a wild goose chase by attaching it to a homemade boat, while they settle down for an evening with Scott, who gets fighting drunk and mistakes them for his prodigal sons before they strap him to his armchair and let him sip beer through a straw while watching the telly.

The next morning, Walley is distraught to discover that the cops recovered the entire shipment of cocaine and feigns hay fever when Murphy accuses him of crying. However, he has problems of his own, as he needs the loo and mitches off to attend to his business in the castle ruins. As he crouches, he sees a figure in the distance and fetches Walley to marvel at the sight of club-footed drug dealer PJ Gallagher cuddling a bale of coke in his sleep. Despite waking him, they manage to evade his grasp and cycle away from the coast with a sense of jubilation that only dissipates when they realise they snagged the bag on a barbed wire fence and that its contents have spilt out along the road.

Furious with Murphy for blowing his one chance of hitting the jackpot, Walley punches him on the nose and leaves him to strop off alone. But other misfortunes are starting to pile on top of one another, as Gallagher has found a name tag inside Murphy's discarded jacket and returned to Cork in a stolen car, while MacHale notices the ring on Walley's finger in the photograph Rose presents at the police station when reporting her son missing. Moreover, Casey has been released from prison, where he has been sharing a cell with a small-timer who slept with Walley while wearing his Casey mask and a pair of Murphy's name-labelled underpants.

While Gallagher steals a nail gun by shooting DIY shopkeeper Fionula Linehan in the arm, Murphy returns home to a frosty, but sympathetic welcome from Rose, while Walley gets beaten by Sands for finishing off his booze. Their struggle is interrupted, however, when MacHale knocks at the door and Walley is about to go quietly when a neighbour kid tells him that Gallagher is looking for Murphy with murder in his eyes. Giving MacHale the slip, Walley bursts into the kitchen where Murphy and Rose are having a hilarious heart-to-heart about whether she is a worse mother than he is a son. He blurts out about the cocaine while trying to fill the sack with flour. But they are interrupted when MacHale arrives at the door, only to be knocked unconscious by Gallagher.

As Rose makes tea, Gallagher asks Murphy and Walley about his drugs. They come clean and admit to being stupid enough to create the longest line of cocaine in history. But Gallagher loses his patience and shoots all three in their kneecaps before being distracted by the doorbell. Casey wanders in to menace Murphy in mistake for Walley, only for the pair to convince Gallagher that Casey has fenced the coke and stashed away the loot. All hell breaks loose (to the accompaniment of the 1992 Sultans of Ping FC hit, `Where's Me Jumper?') when Gallagher drops the nail gun and it starts firing at random while bouncing off the floor.

Fortunately, Rose proves handy with a heavy saucepan when Casey tries to stab Murphy and Gallagher attempts to nail MacHale. He stops the boys from kicking the comatose Casey, who ends up back in his cell in the local nick. MacHale is promoted and Walley placed in foster care with Rose after pleading guilty to bike theft. Consequently, all three wind up working on the fish stall, where Murphy (who has narrated throughout) uses his new-found gift of the gab to chat up pretty customer, Alanna Callaghan.

Superbly played by Murphy and Walley (who simply have to be teamed again) and an admirable ensemble, this is not only consistently droll, but it is also tautly structured in the tradition of the best farces and beautifully photographed by Paddy Jordan. The scenario may not be particularly original, but Foott trusts his actors to find the funny side of every situation. He also refuses to romanticise the struggles the teenagers face, with Walley's domestic travails being handled with insightful sensitivity.

Some have complained about Gallager having a withered arm and a club foot. But there's nothing mocking or cruel about this equal opportunity villainy, which feels akin to some of Gallagher's characterisations in the TV series, Naked Camera. Hilary Rose (who is married to the director) also puts her sketch experience to good use, as she trades barbs with Walley and joshes Murphy about his many fixations and deficiencies. But it's the guilessly gormless Laurel and Hardy-like chemistry between the debutants that makes this so genial and enjoyable.

Once a scratched 16mm staple of grindhouses and sleazy cine-clubs, John Waters's second low-budget feature, Multiple Maniacs (1970), has been somewhat anachronistically restored and released on disc as though it's a revered arthouse classic. Taking its name from Herschell Gordon Lewis's exploitation gem, 2000 Maniacs (1964) and its tonal cues from Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), this is an unabashed piece of trash cinema that is virtually impossible to assess merely as the follow-up to Mondo Trasho (1969) because subsequent items like Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Desperate Living (1977), Polyester (1981), Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990) and Serial Mom (1994) have enshrined Waters as a cherished cult icon.

Waters has stated that he wrote the script as a riposte to the `peace and love' ethos of the hippy era and jokes that it now resembles `a bad John Cassavetes film'. But, for all its stylistic shakiness and gratuitous shock value, Waters is well aware of the picture's transgressive significance and the part it played in ensuring that same-sex issues became a legitimate item on the underground agenda. There's no point pretending Multiple Maniacs is a lost masterpiece. But it contains echoes of Luis Buñuel's surreal contempt for organised religion and the bourgeoisie and is often as hilarious as it is amateurish, audacious and scabrous.

Mr David (David Lochary) works as a barker for the Cavalcade of Perversions run by Lady Divine (Divine) that has pitched its tent on a green space in the middle of a polite Baltimore neighbourhood. Enticing a trio of respectable women (Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole and Cookie Mueller) inside with promises of all the depravities they have ever longed to see, Mr David lures in a dapper man and his reluctant girlfriend in time to see a female freak kissing a bicycle seat, a man fondling a bra and a topless woman having her armpits licked by two drooling acolytes. As the audience gasp in hypocritical disbelief, a top-hatted fellow stubs out a cigarette on another man's back, while a scantily clad group form a pyramid that eerily anticipates the infamous photograph snapped inside Abu Ghraib.

Another quartet arrives in time to see a naked model drink heavily while a pornographer snaps crotch shots before another couple are duped inside by the prospect of seeing two gay men French kiss, a heroin addict undergo cold turkey and a bespectacled chat eat his own vomit. The camera pans along the line of judgemental bigots who can't take their eyes off the free oddities being presented for their edification. But Lady Divine has to make a living and, consequently, she robs the patrons at gunpoint and shoots one of the women for daring to complain.

The pickings turn out to be slim and Lady Divine confides in Ricky (Rick Morrow) that she wants to quit the racket and set up on her own. Mr David is also keen to sever his ties and start afresh with Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pearce), a Jean Harlow lookalike who refuses to go away and even tries to audition for the show. He makes plans to `perform acts' with her later, but Lady Divine is the jealous type and threatens to turn Mr David into the cops for the Sharon Tate murder (which he remembers nothing about) unless he comes to heel.

They go back the apartment of Lady Divine's daughter, Cookie (Cookie Mueller), who has bunked off school to sleep with Steve (Paul Swift), a member of the radical Weather Underground movement. But, while they chat upstairs, Mr David sneaks away to see Bonnie in a seedy club, only for their conversation to be overheard by Edith the barmaid (Edith Massey), who calls Lady Divine to tip her off that the pair are canoodling. Seething, Lady Divine teeters off on her high heels to catch them in flagrante. But she is dragged into a doorway and raped by a cross-dressing Cavalcade couple high on glue and is grateful to be guided to St Cecilia's by the Infant of Prague (Michael Renner, Jr.), whose appearance Lady Divine takes as a sign of celestial approval for her scheme to kill Mr David.

Inside the church, Lady Divine tries to pray (in a wonderfully echoey voiceover) and ponders the Feeding of the Five Thousand by Jesus Christ (George Figgis). However, the multitude merely stuff their faces in a grotesque manner with the food provided and Lady Divine begins to lose concentration, as she feels the presence of Mink (Mink Stole), who has just emerged from a confessional sporting a Norma Desmond turban. As she strains to focus on the betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane, Lady Divine turns to see Mink eyeing her up and slipping in beside her in the pew. Despite never having entertained lesbian thoughts, Miss Divine could feel herself being overpowered by Mink's lust, while she gave her `a rosary job' as she contemplated the Stations of the Cross.

As Mink explains how she lives in churches and synagogues and steals from poor boxes, Mr David and Bonnie are in the middle of performing an act of their own. She confesses to a fling with a woman in a bus and wishes they could be together 24 hours a day. But, while enjoying a post-coital cigarette, he recalls his time with Lady Divine and their life of crime used to excite him before she went off the rails before killing a cop. Bonnie suggests murdering Lady Divine to prove her love and he promises to find her a gun and cough loudly so she knows when to burst into Cookie's apartment and open fire.

Mr David gets home to find Cookie and Ricky smoking dope on the sofa. She taunts him that Lady Divine is planning to dump him and she can't wait to see the back of him. But Lady Divine and Mink are delayed by a murderous altercation with a cop and Bonnie bursts in to shoot Cookie by accident. They hogtie Ricky and hide the bodies behind the sofa under a portrait of Jackie Kennedy in her Dallas outfit. But Mr David finds a newspaper announcing the arrest of Charles Manson and is more determined than ever to exact his revenge on Lady Divine.

She arrives with Mink, who mocks the lovers for thinking they could fool Lady Divine. But when Bonnie pulls the pistol, Lady Divine stabs her to death with a kitchen knife and turns the blade upon Mr David to slash open his torso and feast on his entrails. As she gorges, Ricky wriggles out from behind the couch, only to be gunned down by the startled Mink. Enraged, Lady Divine stabs Mink before preening in front of the mirror. But she is interrupted by the discovery of Cookie and she laments her loss while changing into something more comfortable.

As she reclines on the sofa and eulogises about maniacs, Lady Divine is raped by a giant lobster that appears out of nowhere. Staggering through the door and cackling with demented defiance, Lady Divine steals a car from a middle-class female motorist and smashes up the vehicle in which a young couple are petting. Foaming at the mouth, she goes on a rampage through the snowy city streets and forces a crowd of people to flee before she is gunned down to the strains of `America the Beautiful' by members of the National Guard.

Bookended by superb bursts of Sil Austun's twangy guitar track `Wildwood' and `Mars, the Bringer of War' from Gustav Holst's `The Planets', this is a picture that requires a second viewing to enable the viewer to get on to its wavelength and start appreciating the nuances beneath its blithely brash surface. At first, the gross-out set-pieces and outré performances by Divine, Mink Stole and David Lochary distract from the evident intention to mock the conservative and the complacent. But Waters isn't called `The Pope of Trash' for nothing and, beneath the seething hatred of the established order, there's a gleeful air to the viciously anarchic satire - hence the sober recreation of the route to Calvary being blasphemously cross-cut with the bawdy rosary bead assault and the sheer surrealist lunacy of the Lobstora attack.

While Vincent Peranio's rapacious crustacean is surprisingly effective, the monochrome photography is undeniably rough and ready. Moreover, the odd member of the Dreamlanders troupe forgets their lines. But they bash on regardless and that spirit of pre-punk doughtiness gives this flagrantly unPC provocation a camp charm that makes its fury all the more pertinent and relevant to an age when few have any qualms about venting their spleen in the public arena.