Next to Kill Bill, this is only 50 per cent proof, but the last car chase will have you hanging on for dear life.

With its scratchy print, jerky editing and retro title sequence, Quentin Tarantino's fifth film bends over backwards to establish its Seventies sexploitation-flick credentials.

This blend of girlie action flick with retro car-chase movie scores nought out of 10 for artistic expression but four for amiable delinquency.

A horror-comic splatterfest set in 2007, but somehow filmed in 1972, about a posse of women taking revenge on a murderous, misogynist stunt-driver.

Death Proof is an out-and-out dud, a film so profoundly dull, so relentlessly misguided, so criminally self-indulgent you almost feel bad criticising it. It’s like kicking a man on crutches.

The appalling dialogue, mostly about the sexual predilections of his half-naked female cast, is so garbled, spotty and tedious that it fails to sell interest in a single character.

No need to buckle up, Death Proof is stuck in the slow lane. Self-indulgent and uninspired, bankrollers Bob and Harvey Weinstein should have reined in Tarantino with a genuine Grindhouse-sized budget.

Now with added lapdance, QT’s B-movie homage to cars and girls deploys its cheap thrills with laid-back craft and class. Russell’s wicked fun, Bell’s a true trooper. Distributors! Can we have Planet Terror now, please?

There's plenty of fun to be had with Death Proof, but its imitation of a defunct, low-budget style of movie-making is perhaps too accurate when it comes to the genre's flaws.

A waste of time. A waste of celluloid. A waste of talent.