Brain Candy is exactly what one supposes you get when a comedy troupe has a budget thrown at it – and from the look of it a quite reasonable one too. There’s no real plot to it, just a series of loosely interconnecting skits, most of which have been contrived to allow the various members of the group to play multiple roles. All this ends up with is a good deal of running around in drag and people doing things in silly voices. You can admire the impressions, but there is surprisingly little to the film that seems funny at all. Mostly there’s a forcedness to it all. Some of the humour ventures into areas of questionable taste – a character called Cancer Boy and a lot of embarrassed gay humour. Example of the film’s at times staggeringly unfunny wit – a platoon leader orders a bare-butted officer to go and deal with the enemy: “Here’s what we do – you go over there and fuck them and we’ll stay here and masturbate.”

The central idea of a happiness pill was first used in What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968). One can also spot up-and-coming Canadian actress Nicole de Boer, from Cube (1997), tv’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1992-9) and The Dead Zone (2001-2), in a small part as a rock concert groupie.