Reviewed - Brothers of the Head: LOOK everybody, it's Ken Russell. Someway into this agreeably deranged mock-documentary, the veteran director's great strawberry of a head explodes on screen to tell us about a lost film made by its bearer some years back.

That picture, brief excerpts of which appear, told the story of a pair of conjoined twins who, in the grisly years immediately preceding the emergence of punk, formed a coarse, brittle rock band named Bang Bang. The brothers, many of whose associates would feel at home in the fiction of Charles Dickens, had been sold by their father to an unscrupulous rock promoter, who set out to market them as a bicephalic musical version of the Elephant Man.

Defying the manipulators' intentions, Bang Bang went on to perform songs that, through their stubborn celebration of oddness, managed to lend dignity to the twins and their condition. Perhaps Bang Bang's cult success prepared the ground for the later advance of the Sex Pistols.

Brothers of the Head, adapted from a 1977 novel by Brian Aldiss, does include quite as much madness and bad behaviour as one might expect from a Russell film. It is, however, a considerably less baroque entity than any of the great man's key works.

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, whose best known film to date is Lost in La Mancha, the record of Terry Gilliam's failure to complete a cherished project, call upon their well-honed skills in the field of documentary to deliver a clammy, sepia-toned gothic tragedy featuring raw performances and brief glimpses of terrible things. They are well served by twins Harry and Luke Treadaway, purposefully fragile in the central roles, and by Clive Langer, a veteran of the post-punk era, who has written the band's convincingly grating songs.

For all that, the film's demands to be mistaken for a genuine slice of verite are too easy to resist. The evil characters are evil in the manner of panto villains, and none of the talking heads - not even that very red one - quite manages to fake spontaneity. Approach the film as a messy amalgam of several estimable schools of English cultural eccentricity and you should, however, find yourself satisfactorily diverted.