Paul Tickell's Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is an ambitious, intermittently effective movie based on a satirical novel written 30 years ago by the promising experimental novelist B.S. Johnson who committed suicide shortly after its publication. Nick Moran plays a psychopathic working-class Londoner who takes a correspondence course in accountancy and decides to conduct his life accoording to the principles of double-entry book-keeping. He records every aggravation he receives in the debit column and every act of recompense and revenge he takes in the credit column, causing havoc everywhere.

Writer-director Tickell has misguidedly turned a few hints from the novel about the activities of Luca Bartolomeo Pacioli, the Renaissance monk who invented double-entry book-keeping, into a parallel plot. He has also, unwisely, dropped Johnson's ironic first-person commentary and made Christie the narrator. Conducted With a mixture of clumsiness and imagination, it's a one-joke movie, but a creditable affair that the ICA has done well to take off the shelf and put into distribution.