“How fast does a woman decompose?”

A mangled car. Two women artfully dead on the back seat. The driver badly injured and sharing the front of the car with a dead swan. If that isn’t the way to start a film, I don’t know what is.

The women were the wives of brothers Oliver and Oswald Deuce, biologists who work in a zoo.

And just typing the above has made me go “oh, I see”. Deuce - as in two. Both with names beginning with “O”, or “two noughts”.

Now, for the record, although I’m imagining I’m going to have that reaction a couple more times whilst typing up my notes here. I PROMISE I’m going to keep the screamingly obvious observations to a minimum and concentrate on just taking the piss. Because no-one wants to read a list of my sudden uninformed realisations of what was happening on-screen that I singularly failed to pick up while I was actually watching the thing.

Oswald (Brian Deacon) and Oliver (Eric Deacon) are understandably pretty upset by the pre-film accident. Oswald perhaps more so, saying “I cannot stand the idea of her rotting away.” (Remember this, it’s important later. Although for the record here, I’m still not entirely sure why).

They visit the driver of the car, Alba Bewick (Andrea Ferreol), in hospital. Or what passes for a hospital in this kind of film. More of a windy stately home, by the looks of it. Alba seems remarkably chipper considering she’s just been responsible for the death of two people (and a swan). She has lost a leg in the incident, which weirdly seems to delight her. “In the land of the legless the one-legged woman is queen!” she opines, which given the situation seems a tad insensitive. But to be honest, no-one in this film is operating with a full deck. Or cage, if you will.

Meanwhile a be-hatted and somewhat off-the-leash acting-wise Joss Ackland appears to have upgraded his “racist South African gangster” routine from Beverley Hills Cop 2. This character, Van Hoyten, hates things which are both black and white, for some reason. And so begins a one man murderous crusade against dalmations, zebras and (one assumes) any number of other, unseen, monochromatic unfortunates. Like swans! Oh!

Sorry, I did say I wasn’t going to react to any sudden insights, didn’t I? But “oh!” Anyway.

And meanwhile (part 2), here comes Venus de Milo (Frances Barber). Not really sure what the point of her character is unless having a woman wandering around in the nuddy is important to the plot. Perhaps her inclusion is a way of balancing out the male/female nudity on show, because Oliver and Oswald are not averse to casting off their clothes throughout the film, whether the scene demands it or not. By the end I’d taken to gauging the temperature on-set by the size of their meat-and-two-veg.

And speaking of naked people, there’s also a strange other woman wandering about called Caterina Bolnes (Guusje van Tilborgh), who wears a huge red feather hat and ALSO gets naked quite a lot. Her look isn’t a million miles away from that of Princess Margaret. Which I doubt was the intention (it had more to do with classic art), but if you’ve always wondered what it would be like to see a member of the Royal Family with their bush on display, this is the film for you.

And just in case things aren’t quite mad enough yet, the film also gives a role to snooker-orientated, probably cancellable 80s “comedian” Jim Davidson, who appears to be channelling Robin Askwith as a pop-up zookeeper.

Ah yes, the zoo…

So. Everything revolves around the zoo, and in particular the enormous, glowing sign saying “ZOO” by its gates. The brothers (later revealed to be twins, then identical twins, then conjoined twins who were separated at birth) become more and more obsessed with decay, and use their zoo-based laboratory to set up time-lapse photography to document the effect of time on bigger and bigger animals, ably supplied by both the chipper zookeeper and the theriocidal Van Hoyten. One of the twins (I forget which) tries to take his own life by munching down on  some broken glass (naked, of course) but against all sense this aborted attempted suicide doesn’t seem to have any lasting consequences. Alba meets up with a dude with no legs (played by the-guy-from-Raiders-whose-face-melted-no-not-that-one-the-other-one Wolf Kahler) and decides that’s the way to go for her.

And the boys, their shenanigans narrated by David Attenborough, hit on a plan to take their shared obsession to its (un)natural conclusion. A final scene which is simultaneously worthy of a round of applause for its actors’ dedication to their art, and utterly revolting. Put it this way, if you don’t like snails, steer clear.

So no, it’s not really horror as such. But A Zed And Two Noughts has more than its fair share of gore, weirdness, body-horror and nasty decay to merit a mention in the wacky world of British horror history. It is also hysterically over-the-top and, it has to be said, beautifully filmed. Which let’s face it, is very much in this director’s ballpark.

Pretentious, moi?