Most filmmakers today try to get the best-looking picture that their money can buy. Canadian director Guy Madden goes off in the other direction degrading and ageing footage so that it looks like it has been languishing for decades in some dark vault.

At first, you think why ask an audience to sit through an hour and forty minutes of flickery black-and-white film (think Nosferatu, or the Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, and you get the picture) when perhaps only a few minutes would be required to set the mood before going into the story in glorious colour. Lack of money or artistic vision? Both? Whatever, Madden toys with the filmmaking vernacular of early cinema to create a demented, and hilarious musical melodrama. Enjoy the ride into weirdness.

The setting is the Canadian prairie city of Winnipeg during the depression. Grainy faces of weary workers peer wanly through the gloom of Thirties-era celluloid and snow flakes drift jerkily across the shadowy frame of the picture.

The story, adapted from an original screenplay by author Kazuo Ishiguro, is totally barmy. The literally legless, beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly (played by a luscious Isabella Rossellini in blonde wig) announces a competition to reward the saddest music in the world with 25,000 "depression-era" dollars. Fearing that prohibition will end south of the border she is looking for music that will make people drink more of her beer.

The contest is like a spoof of the Eurovision Song Contest with teams ranging from African tribesmen in grass skirts to the Scots contingent in kilts and bunnets converging on the Winnipeg brewery.

We follow Broadway impressario Chester Kent (played with emollient humour by Kids In the Hall's Mark McKinney) who returns to his hometown accompanied by Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) an amnesiac nymphomaniac who has a tapeworm that talks to her.

Chester, Canadian-born, enters for America. His brother Roderick (Ross McMillan), who is inconsolable over the loss of his son and wife, also turns up and enters for Serbia. Meanwhile, singing "Red Maple Leaves" for Canada, is their father (David Fox) who is wracked with guilt after having accidentally cut off his loved-one's legs while drunk driving.

Adding to the catalogue of absurdities is the competition itself, which plays out like a game show with one nation firing off musical shots against another while surrounding beer drinkers roar with approval. In a box, high above the proceedings, Lady Port-Huntly monitors the rate of beer-drinking as each competitor plays, before giving a Neronic thumbs up or down and sending the winning team down a slide into a vat of beer.

The smarmy Chester Kent greases his way through each stage of the competition with a series of backstage deals and on-stage American pizzazz. Let me win, he tells opponents, and I'll pay for your trip back home. In a crude reflection of the historical power relationship between America and other nations, they do.

But the question remains will grief win over production values? Must Chester confront his own sadness? Just how lunatic can things get? Very: try a pair of prosthetic legs made of glass and filled with bubbling beer for size.

As well as the grainy and contrasty look, and futuristic sets reminiscent of Flash Gordon and Metropolis, the performances riff on that era's melodramatic qualities: Rossellini is a marvellous mixture of the imperious and the desperate, Fox brings pathos and pain in large measure, and Ross McMillan as the ultra-sensitive Roderick is permanantly anguished (he's the hardest to watch). McKinney, although he lacks a tragic dimension, keeps the comic flow moving along with his wise-guy comments, and Maria Medeiros is wide-eyed and serene.

Altogether this is a welcome and enjoyable experiment. But be warned, for all its style, the low res quality does make for a demanding viewing experience.