In this oddball comedy, Simon Pegg plays Jack, a writer who, in the midst of researching Victorian serial killers, has worked himself up into a paranoid frenzy. Jack is spooked by every creak, every breeze, every shadow and shape. But are these fears entirely irrational?

His agent Clair (Clare Higgins) has set up a meeting for him, but lacking a clean pair of pants to his name, Jack must brave the outside world and, worst of all, the laundrette.

Based loosely on a short story by Withnail & I director Bruce Robinson, this film is written and directed by Crispian Mills, son of film star Hayley Mills and frontman of the band Kula Shaker. This film is clearly a labour of love for Mills and he makes a strong impression with this, his feature length debut.

Visually the film is deliriously over the top, chucking the viewer into Jack's wacky mindset and throwing surreal images of stop motion paper cut-out serial killers, gigantic eyeballs and mysterious men hidden in duvets.

Despite being confined to a handful of locations Mills manages to warp these dismal locations into gaudy caricatures of squalour and obsession. The grime of the flat owes another debt to Robinson's aforementioned Withnail, but the overall tone of the feature seems more in keeping with his over-looked sophomore satire How To Get A Head in Advertising.

Pegg's performance is akin to Richard E Grant's in that latter film, a gibbering, howling, manic flailing wreck of a man who has driven himself quite bonkers. Tonally the film swerves from oddly unnerving to awkward laughter with a mixed success rate, but there's a crumpled likability to Pegg's ever more twitchy Jack that keeps the film bobbing along nicely.

Once Jack's mania is taken out into the real world and towards the laundrette the film's pace suffers a little, and there's a notable slump towards the end. But thanks to co-director Chris Hopewell (who directed the video for Radiohead's There There) there's a rather lovely scruffy stop-motion aside and the film is wrapped up with enough warmth and wit to forgive a number of its stumbles.

Ultimately the picture is an eccentric and daffy film with a pronounced visual sensibility and an identity and attitude all of its own. It's not entirely successful, but is an undoubtedly off-beat and occasionally dazzling and whimsical film.

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