Royston Vasey is a well fucking strange place to find oneself, but never more so than on the verge of postmodern implosion. So one can safely conclude from watching the League chaps’ triumphant big-screen outing, an Adaptation style leap from the TV show’s surruralism into, well, not reality exactly, but somewhere not local at any rate.
The fittingly bizarre plot sees Royston’s most superficially normal inhabitants – Young Boy Studies guru, Herr Wolf Lipp, frightfully coarse psycho Geoff and cannibalistic butcher, Hilary Briss – go forth into the ’real world’ to seek out their creators, lest their village be destroyed by a heavily-signposted (fire in the skies, murals depicting ejaculating giraffes) apocalypse.
Unfortunately, Messrs. Pemberton, Gatiss, Shearsmith and Dyson (the one you never see) have moved on to write an even stranger Hammer horror-ish Reformation oddity, prompting kidnappings, beatings and three-way showdowns between the villagers, their progenitors and their 1690 rivals. You’d sort of have to be there.
Though pop-grotesques such as Pauline and Papa Lazarou are largely confined to the subs’ bench, the film’s impressive contingent of freaky happenstance – attacks by a three headed monster, occult demon monkey ceremonies – should keep mondo-goth hounds happy. Besides, Apocalypse’s weird-fish-out-of-water dynamic could not have worked had all and sundry run away screaming in the opposite direction, a certainty were Edward and Tubbs to pop their dreaded snub noses around every door.
Though brilliant and queasy, it’s difficult to imagine this demented self-reflexive universe winning the League many new converts beyond their reasonably vast and hopelessly devoted fan base. Still, it’s probably only right and proper that the Gentlemen stay local.

Running time 95mins. Cert 15a. Opens June 3rd.