Written by Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, this 2008 sci-fi/horror movie sees a Cambridge professor (Simon Callow) don a virtual reality spacesuit and go Emeritus Psycho when he comes back as occultist magician Aleister Crowley.

Who better to write a film about one of Britain’s most notorious polymaths than pilot, brewer and singer Bruce Dickinson? Maybe someone whose many talents include screenwriting. Mercifully some of the barmy dialogue (“You must free yourself of your restrictive knickers!”) is completely drowned out by the ineptly mixed soundtrack, which includes Maiden and George Formby. Together at last.

Dickinson does not seem a man prone to embarrassment (judging by some of his stage outfits) and he approaches the esoteric subject matter with the same gusto he brings to even the most conceptually confusing Iron Maiden songs (“In a time when dinosaurs walked the earth” etc). And Chemical Wedding is certainly not short on ideas, invoking astral planes, occultist orgies and immaculate conception (as in how the fuck did this get made?) while Crowley stomps around murdering women, shitting on desks and generally disproving the existence of the magic of cinema.

Tying all this into something vaguely coherent would take a great director, but the “cunt recording this” (Monty Python collaborator Julian Doyle) might as well be Garth Marenghi. He aims for Prince of Darkness-style cosmic horror but lands closer to Bernard’s Watch, with a visible cheapness that one would have assumed impossible in 2008. The editing is also a total mess, somehow missing out the inciting VR incident and even using star wipes as scene transitions.

This film defies explanation and categorisation, making it occasionally fascinating for fans of weird cinema and Iron Maiden (there are nods to Moonchild and The Evil That Men Do). But Chemical Wedding‘s embarassing brew of schoolboy humour, occultist waffle and Hammer homage conjures more tonal lurches than the weakest Maiden epics, and ends up the biggest VR disaster since the Metaverse.