In Elizabethan England, a wicked lord (Vincent Price) massacres nearly all the members of a coven of witches, earning the enmity of their leader.

To a soundtrack that's more indecipherable than deafening, we watch these ragged, puny theatrics and wonder: was that all it was?

Letts' film is hardly a 'movie' at all, more  a ragbag of holiday snaps that happen to have been taken with a moving camera.

Third-rate bootleg sound on most of the live footage makes one band sound like another; colour film that bleeds faces into walls gives everything an aura of kiddie psychedelia.

Letts had no idea how to film his subject.  He just pointed the camera and pulled the trigger.  That the results are so mundane is punk's telling epitaph.

Three good things:  Subway Sect blitz chaotically through 'Why Don't You Shoot Me', with Vic Goddard perfect as the weariest man alive.

Wayne County does 'F*** Off'.  The Heartbreakers outplay everybody with 'Chinese Rocks'.

The rest is an almanac that nobody can remember as punk.  The Slits, ATV and Eater are all bags of shambolic neuroses, minus the obsessiveness that would make it interesting.  The Roxy figures as an anonymous cellar.

I don't see myself in the crowd.

If this is how history will see it, it will laugh at the 'outrage': kindly policemen telling BOY staff that they mustn't put bits of plastic flesh in their window, The Clash being silly at a service station, Eater chopping up a pig's head.  It's all childish naughtiness.

Ten years on, these creatures aren't charming, exciting or funny: they look like bad babies, destined to turn into toothless wrecks.

Only Siouxsie, popping vitamin pills and looking more hermaphrodite than witch queen, raises an indulgent smile. The Punk Rock Movie is a messy Polaroid of a tiny corner of a sort of tidal wave.  Richard Cook