Although it's nowhere near as overtly grungy as those films - it was at least shot on 35mm to a minimum professional standard, and has a name actor in the lead - it nonetheless was very much a return to his roots: shot guerrilla-style in less than a month on a relatively tiny budget, and uncompromising in the extreme. This NC-17-rated version is uncut visually (unlike the British video and TV versions), though it should be noted that the soundtrack has undergone a slight alteration since the film's original release - Schoolly-D's 'Signifying Rapper' had to be cut after it fell foul of a sampling copyright lawsuit. That said, I'd argue that the scene it accompanied - the brutal rape of a nun in a church - is actually rendered rather more effective by the use of organ music in this version.

As with Driller Killer, Bad Lieutenant is not a film for casual viewers in search of a few cheap thrills. This needs emphasising given its ferocious reputation: instead of revelling in violence and rape, Ferrara is clearly appalled by it: there's none of the electricity that accompanied similar material in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, nor the ambiguity of, say, Peckinpah's Straw Dogs.

And Harvey Keitel's astonishing, self-lacerating performance is light years away from the traditional antihero, tipping a sly wink to the audience to show that he's really one of the good guys. This man is a total scumbag - and that's Ferrara's point, in what must be one of the most aggressively pro-Catholic films made in recent years, he demonstrates that even the most pathetic and wretched human being may eventually find redemption.

The Bad Lieutenant (we never know his real name) is a New York cop swimming around in a cesspool of his own making (to quote a former British chief constable). We first see him advising his two boys how to answer back to their mother, and on a regular basis throughout the rest of the film he takes a peculiarly twisted delight in humiliating women, most notoriously in the scene where he stops a couple of underage girls without a driving licence and demands sexual favours in exchange for letting them off.

On top of that, he's a drug user (and indeed dealer), he takes bribes, he steals, he hides evidence, and owes tens of thousands of dollars to vicious loansharks as a result of an increasingly desperate gambling habit. In short, he's both morally and literally bankrupt - or at least that's how he appears at first.

But when he's assigned to investigate the above-mentioned nun rape, he realises that he is still in touch with the concept of sin, and that his behaviour up to that point has been as a result of his own weakness in the face of temptation. And as he wrestles with his conscience in the film's second half, Keitel's performance becomes all the more remarkable - apparently he agreed to do the script because it gave him a chance to explore his own inner demons, and he goes further in that respect than almost any other name actor I've ever seen, most notably in the scene where he bares both his body and his soul: stark naked, crying helplessly like a baby.

The DVD is about as good as could realistically be expected, given the film's low budget and rough-and-ready production values - and those who saw the Driller Killer DVD can relax: this is on a completely different plane in terms of technical quality! It's in anamorphic 1.85:1, and the picture quality is for the most part very good indeed, though since it's my job to be picky I'll point out that there are a few noticeable artefacts and very occasional blurring on motion (this disc dates from 1998, and it's clear that great strides have been made since then in terms of encoding!), while some shots are more than a little grainy (though this was true of the 35mm version as well). But this really isn't the kind of film where this makes a particularly big difference.

The soundtrack is the original Dolby 2.0 Surround, and there's not a great deal in the way of sonic thrills, but - again - it's not that kind of film. Overall clarity is excellent considering Ferrara's fondness for on-location recording and overlapping dialogue. There are 30 chapter stops, which is more than enough for a 96-minute film.

Extras are relatively basic - seven pages of production notes, and a set of biographies and filmographies of the three lead actors, Ferrara and producer Edward R Pressman, though the stylised main menu, with heavily textured scenes from the film playing in the background, is very effective. The DVD sleeve claims that there's a theatrical trailer on the disc as well, but I couldn't find one.

Michael Brooke