Over at Cappuccino Culture, film critic and friend to TFAD, Pete Hoskin has written an excited celebration of The Welcome Return of Nicholas Cage in Werner Herzog’s recent reimagining of the seminal Abel Ferrara-Harvey Keitel collaboration ‘Bad Lieutenant’. Over on The Big Picture’s website John Berra has written a similar piece recommending the remake. In case you’ve never seen the original, or are uncertain about whether to check out Herzog’s new filming, we’ve put together a small compendium of clips to ensure you become every bit as excited about ‘Bad Lieutenant’ as Pete and John (and us).

Firstly, we have trailers for the two pictures. When watching them, what’s most interesting – aside from the lunatic vivacity of that leaps at you even from these two-minute adverts – is that much of the praise that Ferrara’s version received is now being given to Herzog’s. For a film to be acclaimed by critics as a classic example of trashtastic cinema is very rare. For it to be remade, by an equally out-there actor and a director just as talented as his predecessor, and for that remake to be similarly celebrated by critics, is close to astonishing.

The success of both ‘Bad Lieutenants’, of course, hinges upon the unhinged performances at their centres. Here’s one of the most affecting moments from the original movie: a blasphemous implosion of self-recrimination and anger as Harvey Keitel says, ‘I’m sorry’.

Both films feature a significant amount of self-medication. In Herzog’s version, Cage has a considerably harder time obtaining legal drugs than he does getting hold of some semolina pilchards.

It is, I think, entirely accurate to say that the most maniacal characters associated with either film appear, not in front of the camera, but behind it. More has been written about Werner Herzog’s insanity than about his movies (he is, after all, the director who continued an interview with Mark Kermode despite having just be shot). And when Pete Hoskin described, ‘The way his eyeballs bounce around in their sockets … and all those amphetamine fiend mannerisms and twitches…’ he could, just as accurately, have been talking about most people’s first impressions of Abel Ferrara as of Nicholas Cage.