Oh deer, oh deer, oh deer

There is an unwritten rule in film criticism that certain films are beyond rebuke. Citizen Kane, Some Like It Hot, 2001, The Godfather Part II... all these are considered to be classics of such universally accepted stature that they may only be criticised within a framework of first admitting just how brilliant they really are. Another example is Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, which screens this week as part of FilmFour's Christopher Walken season, and which is generally regarded as the high-water mark of angst-ridden Vietnam movies. Critics wept, audiences were wooed, Oscars were awarded - the world went nuts as everyone faced up to the fact that there was a new masterpiece in town.

Well, bollocks to that. At the risk of being thrown out of the 'respectable film critics' circle, may I take this opportunity to declare officially that in my opinion The Deer Hunter is one of the worst films ever made, a rambling self indulgent, self aggrandising barf-fest steeped in manipulatively racist emotion, and notable primarily for its farcically melodramatic tone which is pitched somewhere between shrieking hysteria and somnambulist somberness. It is a monument to everything that was wrong with American cinema in the mid-seventies, and a testament to the fact that, if allowed to do whatever they want, filmmakers will take their cameras and crawl up their own backsides. If you ever wanted proof that we really need producers like Joel Silver in the world (producers who will tell their directors to stop behaving like babies and cut to the chase now) then The Deer Hunter is it.