Ken Russell is a highly talented and oft-maligned director who, as the Virgin International Encyclopaedia of Film observed, ‘refuses to make movies in the genteel British tradition.’ As such his oeuvre rarely finds favour with the critics, but is often highly popular with the unwashed mob of real people who intermittently attend the cinema. For a while, things got difficult for this original and therefore feared director. It looked as if he was going to get stuck in the United States, waiting years to direct not-good studio potboilers like Altered States and Crimes of Passion. But no! Russell came sailing back to these shores on the wave of video money which erupted in the mid eighties, when new companies - in this instance Lord Branson’s Virgin Vision plc - financed features on the basis of anticipated video and TV sales. This is how many films in the eighties were made, among them Company of Wolves, Empire State, Sid & Nancy and a whole string of madcap low-budget high-energy Ken Rus