Dead Babies

Adapted from the cult novel by Martin Amis and helmed by independent stage director William Marsh, this is a quirky heightened-reality effort about the extremes society will go to for new thrills and kicks. Updating the novel's action from the early 1970s, Marsh sets his movie in the near future where a group of upper-class misfits (including Olivia Williams, Paul Bettany and Charlie Condou) performs a controlled experiment with a new superdrug invented by a Charles Manson-style chemistry professor (played by Marsh). The orgiastic situation at the country house on the outskirts of London where the misfits are living degenerates rapidly when anonymous letters turn up and a "conceptual terrorist" action group threatens the hedonists' very existence. Loaded with disturbing imagery, gruesome special effects and startling sex scenes, this somewhat heavy-handed social critique still manages to raise provocative questions about how relationship dynamics are being transformed by the recreational drug culture. Suffering from low-budget trappings and dodgy moments of calculated sermonising, Dead Babies is worth seeing if only for Andy Nyman's scene-stealing performance as a sexually-frustrated nerd dwarf from hell - with weird fashion sense to boot. Far better than that other Amis adaptation, The Rachel Papers, Marsh's strange and oddly atmospheric fable is bound to divide audiences and critics alike.