DAVID CRONENBERG’S Spider is his first offering for a while and in many ways it shows. The story of a shabby, mentally disturbed man (Ralph Fiennes) contemplating his turbulent boyhood, it has a damp, flat, airless style that dares you to breathe in or out too deeply.

The same could have been said of an earlier Cronenberg work, Crash, the J.G. Ballard automobile snuff fantasy. Or, even earlier, the chillingly futuristic Videodrome, and Dead Ringers, the gynaecologically minded slab of hyper-realism.

This is where Cronenberg likes to live artistically — not so much within his own style, rather on the controversial edges of it. Which could explain why his movies often have a brittle, half-made look, almost as if he dreamt them rather than filmed them. It could also explain why one often comes away from Cronenberg’s work wondering: “What happened there?” And (for the female viewer): “Quite liked it. Wouldn’t want to date him.” Cronenberg has a deserved reputation for being “challenging” towards women in his movies. God knows, he’s not alone. However, no other director has ever seen fit to turn the speculum into even more of an instrument of torture than it already is (Dead Ringers). Then there was Debbie Harry’s incessant degradation in Videodrome, not to mention the slyly sexual puppetry of the female victims in Crash (he flung them around as if they were pornographic rag dolls).

Other Cronenberg movies, such as The Dead Zone, threw one off track a little (it is one of the superior Stephen King adaptations). With Spider, an adaptation of Patrick McGrath’s novel by the author himself, Cronenberg is back on his studied psychosexual track.

We meet Dennis Cleg (played by Fiennes) as a grown man in a bad way. He is a crouched, grubby, twitchy, mumbling, obsessively note-taking freak who lives, or, more precisely, exists in a halfway home for the mentally ill run by a strutting Lynn Redgrave and peopled by men as disturbed and miserable as himself. There is, however, brief humour with a Derek and Clive moment, when one of his fellow lodgers mournfully intones: “I got a letter from that Sophia Loren.”

Cleg’s is a joyless life: dingy digs that look as if they have been dunked in strong tea; no one to care for him; solitary walks (more shuffles, actually) around his boyhood haunts with only his memories for company. The moral edge of the film lies in the fact that Cleg is not that unusual. We all hurry past people like him every day.

Cronenberg’s device is to have Cleg standing inside scenes from his past watching his boyhood self. Young Spider (Bradley Hall) is caught between his his decent, slightly pious mother (Miranda Richardson) and his bored, feckless father (Gabriel Byrne). One day, his father has sex with a floozy under a bridge, an act which eventually leads to murder.

The floozy, as seen by the young Spider, is the opposite of his mother — coarse, cruel and highly sexual. Spider is repulsed and wants her dead. Then again, she may have more in common with his mother than is first apparent.

Cronenberg uses the film to explore oedipal impulses, and the Madonna-Whore merry-go-round endured by all women. Less happily, even as Cronenberg seems ready to accept duality in women, he also seems rather too keen to punish them for it. In this way, he is a pimp of a director, providing platforms for female issues and then slapping them about when they get too colourful. However, that is not the main problem with Spider. The film’s slow, plodding pace relies too much on strong performances and grubby splashes of “atmosphere” rather than genuine emotion and plot.

The result is impressive in parts but not madly watchable. We are supposed to be viewing events through Cleg’s scrambled mind, but this does not fully explain why we are left at the end with a combination of Tales of the Totally Expected and a half-finished Dennis Potter draft.

It’s all done in the style of a slightly macabre episode of Shine on Harvey Moon or a Hovis advert gone very very wrong. It could be that Cronenberg was simply sick of his “controversy” tag and wanted to take a different direction with Spider. However, something tells me that he won’t stay using this “voice” for long.

Ahhh, Star Trek! As a child I would get up in the night to press my nose against the bedroom window, look up at the stars and wish . . . I could be downstairs watching television. Possibly even Star Trek, but anything really, just so long as I didn’t have to go to bed. Which is one way of saying that some people enjoy all this “far-off galaxies” stuff while others will happily accept it as entertainment if there’s nothing else on offer.

Being in the latter category I could easily contain my excitement at the release of Star Trek: Nemesis. It features the TV series’ “second generation”, headed by Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart), who uncovers some sinister cloning/taking-over-the-universe shenanigans by a bald baddie (Tom Hardy) who looks like a badly dressed boiled egg.

It’s not bad, really. It is also the tenth Star Trek movie, which means an awful lot of celluloid featuring grown men wearing children’s stretchy pyjamas and standing behind plasterboard consoles looking purposeful. Stop being snobs. There should be special Oscars for things like that.

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