REVIEWED - THE DUKES OF HAZZARD: Frightening Texan Jessica Simpson offers the only diversion in this unnecessarily terrible film, writes Donald Clarke

BY CASTING the pavingstone-toothed Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke - that pioneer of the independent woman's right to sashay provocatively before deputy sheriffs - the producers of The Dukes of Hazzard implicitly announced their intention to take an already unsophisticated entertainment way downmarket.

A frightening Texan, whose nauseatingly powerful vibrato is, mercifully, kept in check until Hazzard's final credits, Ms Simpson is from a puzzling class of celebrity which didn't exist when the original series was in its pomp. She is, surely, too heavily varnished to be properly sexy. Her acting is not quite on a par with Dame Flora Robson's. And that 500 megahertz warble is more suitable for echo-location than the rendering of popular ballads.

Yet, by offering us a startling phenomenon to puzzle over, she provides more diversion than anything else in this unnecessarily terrible film. Not that anybody cares, the plot concerns an attempt by a thinner, more dubiously taut Boss Hogg - yes, it's Burt Reynolds - to turn Georgia's Hazzard County into a strip mine. Luke and Bo Duke (Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott), two cousins who, a song from less prurient times tells us, are "closer than brothers", jump into their red motor car and, in between taking buckshot in the ass and moonshine down the gullet, set about frustrating the white-suited despot's schemes.

A barely conscious Willie Nelson plays Uncle Jesse. Lynda Carter plays somebody else. The South plays itself. Unlike the perfectly acceptable Starsky and Hutch and the perfectly awful Bewitched, this version of The Dukes makes no real attempt to subvert or parody the original series. (Though a few peripheral African-American characters are introduced to sweeten the TV show's slightly sinister good ol' boy atmosphere.) What we get is 90 minutes of preparation for a final, mighty, slow-motion leap by the boys' car.

As a result, the film does, at least, manage to induce a little nostalgia for bad things from good times. The presence of Burt Reynolds helps in that regard, though it must be depressing to appear in a film of a series that would not have existed without the success of his own Smokey and the Bandit. It's enough to make a possum weep tears of hooch. Or some such down-home guff.