Moon Dogs

Veteran TV director Philip John makes a solid start to his feature career with this fleet-footed road movie. Screenwriters Raymond Friel and Derek Boyle offer little by way of backstory, as Welsh teenager Jack Parry Jones fetches up in the Shetland Isles after his mother marries a local man. But they start to fill in the gaps after Parry Jones forces musical stepbrother Christy O'Donnell to accompany him to Glasgow to check up on his potentially unfaithful student girlfriend. However, a diversion via Orkney complicates matters, as the pair fall for a spirited Irish waitress (Tara Lee), who is determined to perform at the Celtic Connections festival. Faint echoes of several recent Irish movies can be heard throughout an episodic storyline that is stronger on acerbic wisecracks and comic set pieces than it is plot logic and characterisation. But Alasdair Walker's evocative views are matched by the catchy score composed by Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Moreover, the youthful leads are eminently engaging, while the eccentric interludes involving body-piercings, hallucinatory puppets and a toy keyboard are dourly amusing.