Review: Jackboots on Whitehall (12A)***

Packed with profanity, flatulence gags, rumpy-pumpy and outrageous conduct from its entire cast, it is anarchic, rude, ridiculous and excruciatingly funny.

It's also a puppet film with a high-calibre voice cast that includes everyone from Ewan McGregor to Stephen Merchant by way of Timothy Spall and Richard O'Brien.

Sibling directors Edward and Rory McHenry have taken the Second World War and given it a surreal spin as Chris, a none-too-bright farmer with outsized hands (McGregor), finds himself barred from active service as Britain faces off Hitler and his Third Reich.

Yet when the Germans invade, it's all hands to the fray and Chris is at the core of a courageous fightback by a gallery of eccentrics who take on Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and the rest to ensure Blighty is not made to cower under the Nazi yoke.

This one divided audiences at its screenings in Edinburgh back in June. Younger crowds loved its irreverence. Older audiences recognised some of its tongue-in-cheek naughtiness as a reaction to some of those terribly po-faced Brit flicks of the 1950s. Others simply hated it as amateur and puerile.

Yet such an impressive cast would not have signed up to a disaster, and Jackboots on Whitehall is so consistently left-field that everyone appears to be in on – and enjoying – the joke.

An epic in miniature and an instant cult classic that is guaranteed to offend someone everywhere.