"Aw, Mama, can this really be the end... ?"

One of the most perversely heartening things about attending the repulsive Cannes Film Festival a few years ago was witnessing the outrageous critical mauling and comprehensive booing dished out to Terry Gilliam's terrific screen adaptation of Hunter Thompson's cult novel 'Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas'. I have often said that one of the main problems with Cannes is that everybody's brain is fried by the end of Day 2, rendering all critical faculty null-and-void, causing even essentially sensible people to make the stupidest judgements about films they have been watching in the worst possible conditions. At Cannes, Fear And Loathing provoked derision, condemnation, and a couple of walk-outs, one from a prominent American scribe who announced that her paper would have nothing to do with such vile trash. As the knives were drawn, the abuses hurled, and the poisonous pens put into action, I became filled with a strange and wondrous sense of calm and self-justification. "If this bunch of fuckers hate this movie this much," I thought with pride, "then it really must be great."

Exactly what rattled everyone so much about Fear And Loathing is hard to pin down. Most critics emerging from those Cannes screenings complained that the film was like being stuck in a room with two screaming junkies - unsurprising, since the story concerns the semi-coherent ramblings of a devout drug fiend and his slimy lawyer who head off to Las Vegas with a car full of chemicals in search of the American Dream and spend a few days out of their head on dope and speed before concluding that the entire adventure had been nothing but "a lame fuckaround". Certainly, any film based on a novel with chapter titles like "Drug Frenzy At The Circus Circus", "Ugly Peruvian Flashback" and "A Terrible Experience With Extremely Dangerous Drugs" could rightly be expected to concentrate on the narcotic nature of this long day's journey into nightmare. You buy the ticket, you take the ride.