Cecil B.Demented

Where would Adam Sandler, the Farrelly Brothers and even the Dogme 95 school of DIY directors be without John Waters, America's king of kitsch? No Waters, no American Movie, There's Something About Mary or Road Trip.

For the best part of 30 years, Waters has been the outrageous outsider, as off the wall as the Turner Prize, as tacky as glue: his taste for bad-taste films, such as Pink Flamingos, Hairspray and Cry-Baby, a stink-bomb antidote to mainstream Hollywood mediocrity, conservatism and sentimentality.

He considers Hollywood the guilty party in the art of criminal film making, and now takes gleeful revenge with Cecil B. Demented, his hymn to silver-screen terrorism.

Stephen Dorff plays cinema manager Sinclair Stevens, his polite cover for his B movie alter ego, shock-haired shock tactician film-maker Cecil B. Demented, vengeful leader of the Sprocket Holes, a psychotic guerrilla group of tattooed Tinseltown outcasts.

Kidnapping Hollywood's most egomaniac diva, Honey Whitlock, (a marvellously vile Melanie Griffith), Cecil's cinematic combat-force make the reluctant siren learn the art of real film-making in the subversive John Waters style.

As these disciples of Peckinpah Preminger and Fassbinder read the riot act, terrorising Los Angeles' celluloid community in Waters' hostile, garish satire, the epic ambition of Cecil B DeMille meets the sick comic spirit of exploitation movie legend Roger Corman and the experimental urges of the trendy Dogme 95 crowd of Lars Von Trier and co.

Where Robert Altman's 1992 masterpiece The Player was the deft, nonchalant Hollywood send-up, then Cecil B. Demented is the mad, punk put-down, sometimes too chaotic, but other times as on the mark as a laser, especially when making big-budget candy-dross Forrest Gump look such a nauseous chump.