[mousepod]

After returning, disappointed, from PotC 3, I decided to cleanse my palate with a selection from my unwatched DVD pile.

So I cracked the plastic wrap on my copy of Alex Cox's Revenger's Tragedy, which I picked up for a couple of bucks at the Tower Records "Going Out of Business" sale, and popped it in my DVD player.

What a fun flick. The source material is the Jacobean revenge play of the same title originally published in 1607 - and much of the dialog comes straight from the play. Cox updates the setting to a near-future dystopian Liverpool, and by doing so gives himself license to pay homage to all of his favorite genres and directors, like Sergio Leone's westerns and Ken Russell's twisted sex sci-fi fantasies.

The mostly outstanding cast, featuring Christopher Eccleston as Vindici, the Revenger of the title and Derek Jacobi and Eddie Izzard as the father and son objects of Vindici's plot, respectively, eat up the script and spit it out in an over-the-top fashion which rarely verges on ham (and even then, it's reminiscent of Derek Jarman's Jubilee, so that's ok).

In all, a 109 minutes well-spent.