It says something that the press screening of Chemical Wedding, an Aleister Crowley-inspired occult thriller written by the Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, got more laughs than the screening of Sex and the City. However, these laughs were unintentional. There’s a hokey, lurid quality to the storytelling and a slight amateurism that evokes the Hammer Horror pictures. This is certainly not a film that has pretensions of being great art. It’s an exploitation flick pure and simple, with all the ritualistic violence and gratuitous sex and nudity that the genre entails.

Set against the backdrop of Cambridge academia, the story uses a gloriously incongruous device straight out of a sci-fi movie. A virtual-reality suit, designed at Cal Tech by a hot-shot physicist, Joshua Mathers, has been brought to the fusty cloisters of the venerable university. Unfortunately for Mathers, his British counterpart is an occultist who has translated the entire works of Aleister Crowley into binary code and fed them into the machine. His accomplice, a classics lecturer, Dr Oliver Haddo (Simon Callow with an extravagant stutter and a bad wig), dons the suit and emerges channelling the spirit of “the most evil man in the world”.

Callow clearly has a tremendous amount of fun with this role – he’s a devilish ham, roaring his lines like some kind of unearthly blend of Brian Blessed and Satan. If the film is worth watching it’s because of Callow’s unwavering commitment to overacting in every last second of every last scene.

18, 107mins

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