This Filthy Earth

Ugh! What a nasty film. Nastiness was the director's intention. We know that right away when the title scene is of a bull getting an erection.

Mud seems to be the main ingredient here and mud is definitely the director's name. What exactly he intended with this disgusting waste of celluloid is a complete mystery.

The story - there isn't one, really - is about two sisters, who live on a farm somewhere in England, where 21st century methods of farming have not been discovered. They own the land but forfeit it to a man called Buto, who marries one of them, the fatter one. And that's it.

The imagery, on the other hand, is what the director and cinematographer conspire most on. There are plenty of jittering shots of rugged and windy and strangely barren-looking farmland, speeded-up shots of decomposing wildlife, people urinating, guts falling out of strung-up animals and close-ups of ugly faces of people so old they could be the elders of Im Ho Tep.

Every member of the cast is dirty and covered with muck. Fashion is not a factor, either. People don't wear clothes of their choice, they just wear what clothes there are.

If there is one thing this film succeeds at is to prove that Britain is not an island to be inhabited by humans. Here we struggle for survival in some of the toughest and most inhumane conditions imaginable. We're just animals too, get covered in mud and would eat scraps if our life depended on it.

If you were not aware of this already, Andrew Kotting's film will show how futile humanity can be sometimes. But that's all. And the gore and human waste is still gross.

This is the kind of movie that would have been banned 20 years ago.