Madness near the isles

We were not far into The Last Great Wi lderness when I experienced an "I have been here before" epiph any. It was 1966. I was watching Roman Polanski's third film, Cul-de-Sac.

It opened with two gangsters on the run, an empty fuel tank, waves slapping their stranded car on a causeway in Northumbria, enforced overstay in a spooky castle with a deranged owner on Holy Island, and nymphomania and transvestism making for a bad night that ends in mass blood-letting.

David Mackenzie's film is heavily in debt to the same absurdist black comedy elements relocated among the stark, brown wasteland hills of Scotland. He throws a sulphurous pinch of The Wicker Man's sacrificial rituals into the effusion to please pagan cultists. Unfortunately, it's appropriation unrefreshed by inspiration.

Sexual perversities fed Polanski's own propensity to shock. His infantile malevolence made shudders sometimes turn into sniggers - I'll always remember a lipsticked Donald Pleasence in a nightie. Mackenzie's film is different in one respect: you are trying to forget it even while watching it.

He and his screenwriters, brother Alastair Mackenzie and Michael Tait, are dour Scots without the Polish director's kinkiness; and they are too down-to-earth to be convincing about the animism of their own compatriot and repugnant anarchist junkie of the 1960s, the late Alexander Trocchi.

Cul-de-Sac's gangsters have become here a lawless contemporary couple: a soured exhusband (Alastair Mackenzie, known to TV viewers as Monarch of the Glen's young laird) heading for Skye to burn down the mansion of a pop star who cuckolded him, and a sleazy gigolo (Jonny Phillips) who washes his private parts in a public lavatory and is on the run from the hitmen of some hoodlum he twotimed.

The opening set-up is the most suspenseful part of the story because you don't know the madhouse that awaits you. The car runs out of gas (as before) and (as before) the pair end up more like prisoners than guests of a set of country-house oddballs.

Their pathogenic host (David Hayman) is a deranged therapist who is hooked on sexologist Wilhelm Reich's craze for orgone boxes that promote orgasm as well as psychiatrist RD Laing's theories of mad people being the world's sane ones. How passé can you get?

Around him orbits a coven of stressed disciples: an agoraphobic couch-potato, a lapsed religious nut who now babbles about lay pleasures (" masturbation changed my life"), a sex addict still in rehab and a voluptuous Irishwoman ( Victoria Smurfit) with a nymphomaniac daughter.

These people have no function except to mock their own pathetic conditions. Voyeurism is practised in every suite. Every attempt the overnight guests make to settle their bill and say goodbye pulls them deeper into the rites of a place that is a cross between Fawlty Towers and the Bates motel.