Film review: Chemical Wedding

Published on Friday 23 May 2008 18:10

CHEMICAL WEDDING (18)

*

Aleister Crowley craved drunken oblivion and mindless sex. What a loss he will be to the new series of Big Brother when it cranks up next month. However, the Great Beast of occult obsessives has other unholy work to unleash on our screens this summer, namely Chemical Wedding, above, the scriptwriting debut of Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson. A campy horror farce, it poses the question: what would it be like if a strange computer virus infected mild-mannered lecturer Simon Callow, below left, with the spirit of our favourite black magic mountaineer?

The answer scales very few peaks but it is certainly horrifying, although not in the way that Dickinson and his director Julian Doyle intended.

In any film the prospect of a nude orgiastic Callow carries little allure, but Chemical Wedding has such scant regard for the business of constructing adequate thrills or scares that audiences would be advised to seek a quickie divorce.

Dickinson clearly knows his Crowley because the film teems with in-jokes but this juvenile slasher is one interminably grisly waste.

• Released on Friday