With its references to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, Straw Dogs, House of 1000 Corpses and even Monty Python, this is Alex Chandon's best and most accomplished film to date.

Two urban care workers, Kate (Jo Hartley) and Jeff (James Doherty), and the four young tearaways in their charge, Tim (James Burrows), Sam (Nadine Rose Mulkerrin), Zeb (Terry Haywood) and Dwight (Chris Waller), arrive in the picturesque Yorkshire village of Mortlake as part of a weekend community service scheme. Things get off to a shaky start: Tim and Sam glimpse what appears to be a group of children in a field attacking a figure with a bucket over its head, the cottage they've rented is in urgent need of repair (“I've stayed in better squats than this”, remarks Kate), and worst of all, the local pub ('The Dirty Hole') serves hairy scratchings and lemonade that tastes like piss. An encounter with a trio of inbred locals fronted by Gris (Neil Leiper), who had previously accosted Sam outside the pub, leads to an increasingly hysterical and splattery series of events as the group are terrorised by the villagers, with the pub landlord Jim (Seamus O'Neill) revealed as their flamboyant leader.

It really takes a Wes Craven or a Tobe Hooper to examine the tensions that result in a group of city dwellers intruding upon an insular rural community, but Chandon instead plays the whole thing for belly laughs, with a series of gruesome, blackly comic set pieces staged against a quintessentially English backdrop. The outsiders are a mostly unsympathetic lot, but the genuinely freakish villagers are enjoyably characterised, with Jim as the outwardly friendly patriarch of a Texas Chainsaw-style 'family', which include Podge (Dominic Brunt, from Emmerdale), a chainsaw-wielding Leatherface type. In fact, it's by making the villagers such a jolly bunch that the film is so watchable, even when you're past the point of caring whether the urbanites survive or not. The torture scenes set in a barn before an appreciative audience with Jim as the blacked-up host are amusingly done, the over-the-top gore effects range from disturbing to silly, and there's a nice twist on the Final Girl device.

Bereft of the tawdriness that marred the likes of Cradle of Fear and Pervirella, Inbred looks great thanks to cinematographer Ollie Downey's capturing of the North Yorkshire locations. Best of all, though, is O'Neill's performance and 'The Inbred Song', a catchy ditty with an 'eee-by-gum' chorus that O'Neill performs with his cronies (among them Neil Keenan, the song's composer). Emily Booth appears briefly as an axe victim at the beginning of the film.

The extras consist of a trailer, a video diary, a 'making of' documentary, behind-the-scenes footage by Keenan and associate producer Michael Sanderson, and a set of deleted scenes.

LLOYD HAYNES

BUY IT NOW (UK) BLU-RAY • DVD