‘Nothing But Trouble’ is a film that crashed and bombed at the box office in 1991, though it still made $9m at the box office even if this was well short of the $45m it cost to make. I know all this because I attended a rare screening of this directorial debut (since which he has not been allowed to make a film since) by Dan Aykroyd at London’s Prince Charles Cinema. I was first intrigued by this film when a girlfriend of mine back in 1991 went to see it in Cardiff at the time of her ‘A’ level results and wrote to me to say just how disastrous it was. Since then I have always wondered quite how bad it is, and when I saw that it was showing a third of a century later as a lauded ‘disasterpiece’ I couldn’t resist making the pilgrimage into central London.

In truth, I disappointingly enjoyed it – it was not as bad as I feared, though even with a pristine digital print (the original 35mm that was sent from California had corroded and ‘eaten itself’, apparently), this is an incoherent and unstructured mess. But it is also endearing, and a throwback to the sort of cinema that at the time was considered ‘cool’, with the likes of Chevy Chase and John Candy box office draws. Aykroyd himself appears as a century old judge in a small town called Valkenvania where justice is dispensed in a pre-Magna Carter fashion, with the Judge dispensing on the spot electrocutions to those he doesn’t like, while Chase is a banker – deemed the Antichrist by this particular purveyor of justice – and so is dropped from the bench into the dungeon he keeps beneath the courthouse where sadistic punishments are carried out.

Candy also appears as his character’s sister, and Aykroyd plays two adult-sized mutant embryos who also enjoy administering sadistic punishments both on each other and on Chase and Demi Moore who is also in this mess of a film for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom. Moore is a lawyer who meets Chase, a financial publisher, in a lift at a swanky hotel, and somehow they go on a road trip together to Atlantic City, but get cornered in Valkenvania after speeding, and they never manage to leave. At least ‘Groundhog Day’ had some inventive scenarios when its protagonist got stuck in a small town and was unable to get out. Here, there are just pratfalls and booby traps which follow a repetitive pattern.

It’s grotesque and unlike, say, ‘Ghostbusters’ which blended different genres successfully, this is a comedy that doesn’t know exactly what we are supposed to find funny. It never finds its feet, and Chase underplays while everything around him is blowing up and falling apart. It’s not unwatchable – it’s fascinating to watch in its dysfunctional misshapenness – but this misfire firmly belongs to an analogue age of filmmaking and to a time when a film could be made just because its premise sounded sufficiently outrageous or risky.