Bitter revenge

Derek Jarman died in 1994. But the maliciously iconoclastic spectre of the director of Jubilee, that landmark of British pop decadence, haunts Alex Cox's gamey rendering of Thomas Middleton's early 17th century play, The Revenger's Tragedy.

Giggling at the poisoned skulls, the family incest, the wedding breakfast where blood spurts fromevery orifice, the human head among the graveyard flowers and so many murders in the last minutes that you could miss your count if you blinked.

No one need be a purist over Cox's updating of this horror-comic parody of Jacobean genre drama. Even the missing apostrophe in the film's title is forgivable, just.

Cox preserves Middleton's Italianate courtiers - still bearing names such as Lussurioso, Castiza and Supervacuo, that express archetypal lusts, chastity, dumbness, etcetera - but relocates them in today's lawless squalor and amid a perpetual orgy.

The setting is actually Liverpool - a city that only a few months ago did bleak duty for Don Boyd's My Kingdom, a contemporary reworking of King Lear - which has now suffered some apocalyptic event that makes its wreck-strewn, grungy streets look as if Danny Boyle's plague-stricken zombies from 28 Days Later had just cleared out of town.

Obviously, incest is going strong among location film-makers, too, never mind Middleton's ducal deviants who indulge in the punk life-style associated with glam-rock gigs, libidinous roadies and licentious groupies. It's just what you'd expect from Cox's emetic talent that,

back in 1986, brought us Sid and Nancy.

Christopher Eccleston plays Vindici, a one-time courtier who's turned into a raving skinhead after his wife has been poisoned at their wedding breakfast by the duke for refusing the old lecher his rapine desires.

Kissing her shrunken head and manipulating her blackened teeth like a stage ventriloquist, Vindici vows revenge on the entire noble family. He achieves it by plotting that's so labyrinthine no sane persons should worry at losing their way in its incestuous interstices. The Duchess (Diana Quick) mates with one of her sons (Fraser Ayres); another (Eddie Izzard) is stabbed to death; the rest of the brood die by garotte or noose; the Duke (Derek Jacobi) beds Vindici's sister (Carla Henry), but clamps his own lips to those of the poisoned skull and expires in agony; and everyone shoots everyone else, save the court chamberlain (Antony Booth).

He's left to lord it over the jackdaw's pyre of bodies that felicitously illustrates one of Middleton's few poetic lines, "a nest of dukes", that survive writer Frank Cottrell Boyce's and the director's preference for gutter prose and the F-word - as in "F*** off, you cheap pair of bastards".

Ancient or modern, the awkwardly jointed dialogue doesn't come readily to the cast's lips, though Jacobi's Duke, looking like a lipsticked Karl Lagerfeld in black suit and dark shades, gives grace (and even clarity) to the lecher's exultant cry as he feels his seminal sap rising: "My hairs are white and yet my sins are green."