Sweet sorrow

Reviewed - I want Candy:'LONDON is crammed with film companies desperate for good ideas," Joe (Tom Riley) says in the first few minutes of I Want Candy. Not this desperate, surely.

Has the British film industry sunk so low that a cup of warm spit smeared across a few pages of foolscap - a generous metaphor for this film's script - can form the basis for a feature? It would seem so. There is something energising about encountering a film so phantasmagorically dreadful as I Want Candy. The stench that comes off truly rank effluent fires the synapses almost as forcefully as does an encounter with great art.

And, of course, one is warmed by the notion that, barring some extraordinary catastrophe, the worst film of 2007 has already been endured. I Want Candy, adding sacrilege to its lengthy list of misdemeanours, comes from the reconstituted version of the once great Ealing Studios. But its real predecessors are the depressingly detumescent sex comedies that emerged from Wardour Street in the 1970s.

Two young men at a suburban film school, neither of whom is played by Robin Askwith, are commissioned by villains to produce a porn film featuring the most popular adult star of the hour. Sadly, Joe, who seems almost stupid enough to have conceived I Want Candy, has mistakenly booked a blow-up doll of Candy Fiveways (Carmen Electra), rather than the actress herself. Somehow or other, they eventually secure the real Candy's services and begin shooting in Joe's family home.

Featuring dialogue that would shame a radio commercial, this cheap, shoddy, charmless film brings roaring discredit on ever- yone involved. The respectable actors in the cast - Eddie Marsan, Mackenzie Crook - should, perhaps, wear bags on their heads for the few terrible days it remains in cinemas. You have done a very bad thing, people.