18, 114mins

Quentin Tarantino’s eagerly awaited B-movie farce, fails to live up to the hype. The film is an eloquent lament for a sleazy age of exploitation flicks that most of us can barely remember. Kurt Russell plays a scar-faced psycho called Stunt Man Mike. He stalks impossibly beautifully chicks with little brains and fewer clothes. Then he chases them up and down empty roads in a souped-up monster car with a reinforced cage built around the driving seat, hence the title.

The violence, when it eventually comes, is a seminal piece of schlock. The sight of a severed leg tumbling down a highway after a head-on smash drew spontaneous applause. But the script – usually Tarantino’s forte – is worryingly overwritten. The appalling dialogue, mostly about the sexual predilections of his half-naked female cast, is so garbled, spotty and tedious that it fails to sell interest in a single character.

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