Thompson turned into a hysterical old lush

performance, by Emma Thompson, and if you think for one moment that the venerable ET only ever really does bossy middle-class women, then this will disabuse you.

In her cheap fur coat, sitting on the steps at a dog track stuffing herself with a fish supper, she makes Rab C. Nesbitt look genteel. Meanwhile, a serial killer is pervertedly mailing parts of his victims to their relatives, including in one case a severed penis postmarked Arbroath, and local detective Ray Winstone, thinking more leg end than legend, suspects Barney.

Mercifully, Winstone eschews Glaswegian vowels in favour of his usual basso-East Endo, but in truth, he and his fellow cops (including Tom Courtenay as a foul-mouthed chief constable) are more than a little cartoonish. It is the film’s single serious flaw, but still one is left with the sense that everyone involved had a ball — and that’s not another reference to body parts.

n BITS of people also drop off in Maggie, in this instance because a t errible vi r us is s weeping t he United States, turning i ts victims into zombies.

Among them is Maggie herself (Abigail Breslin), the teenage daughter of a farmer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who chooses to care for her at home with the grudging help of his wife ( Joely Richardson), rather than subject her to government quarantine.

It’s grim, post-apocalyptic fare, with a relentless portentous score, and a performance by the Terminator’s Arnie that rather put me in mind of an Easter Island statue trying desperately to emote.