A painful discharge: "Almost Married"

At last, that STD-based romcom we've all been waiting for. Almost Married, another utterly misbegotten venture from British cinema's Poverty Row, concerns Kyle (Philip McGinley), a dead-eyed Northern chancer who, in the run-up to his nuptials, feels an itch - the result of getting his end away with a brothel worker on his stag night. With the aid of his best man Jarvis (Mark Stobbart) - an individual who, as movie best men are wont to be, succeeds in being somehow even less appealing than a man touting a genito-urinary infection - he's obliged to take ever more extreme measures to avoid giving his horny bride-to-be Lydia (yes, Lydia) his chlamydia - and with it some inkling of what he's been up to away from home.

Bizarrely detailed exam-room sequences, and the fact it arrives care of rookie distributors "Tested Films", might be enough to make one wonder whether Almost Married was conceived as part of some wider health program targeting FHM readers too busy tugging on themselves to consider the consequences of unprotected sex. That would be a noble ambition, should it be the case, yet it's how writer-director Ben Cookson targets them that's the problem: with endless, relentless references to masturbation and porn, in-your-face inserts of pissing and vomiting, a persistent background squeal of gay panic in the central male relationship, and a dubious sympathy for its protagonist, who's finally proven to be a top man because - spoiler alert, if there's anything here left to spoil - he couldn't actually get it up to perform with the sex worker, and instead contracted the infection from his cheating fiancée via an episode of experimental Sapphism recounted in the terms of the world's grimmest wank fantasy. Classic banter.

If you can bring yourself to imagine a remake of Sex Lives of the Potato Men as written and directed by the Will Mellor character from Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps (and not want to do yourself extreme physical harm immediately after), then this would be something like it: its abiding bleakness extends to a supposedly jolly family barbeque staged on what looks like the coldest, wettest day of last year, and a final-reel tour of Newcastle's massage parlours that inverts and perverts Cinderella ("She fits! She fits!") while serving chiefly to parade a selection of unfortunate Eastern European extras before the camera's numbed and listless gaze. The safe-sex message is upheld, if only by making the viewer want to tear off their own genitalia, pluck out their straying eyes, and subject their brain to a full chemical wash, in the hope of forgetting one was ever subjected to the experience. Sample line: "We go back to the brothel, and make her take an AIDS test." I mean, really: ugh.

Almost Married afflicts selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD emission on April 7.