REVIEWED - SON OF THE MASK: No, not a sequel to Peter Bogdanovich's 1985 drama about a teenager learning to live with the trauma of having Cher as a mother, but a belated follow-up to the film which made Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz so famous that, well, they are currently somewhere other than here.

Oddly, Lawrence Guterman's not entirely unamusing comedy is as much a tribute to Warner Brothers' great cartoons of the 1950s as it is a continuation of the Carrey vehicle. Tim Avery (Jamie Kennedy), clearly named with the immortal Loony Tunesmith Tex Avery in mind, plays an aspiring cartoonist reduced to hosting tours of an animation studio run by the perennially lugubrious Stephen Wright. One day he finds the enchanted mask which transforms him - and, later, his dog - into a surreally creative whirlwind. In one of the film's several queasy moments, he impregnates his wife while bewitched and, nine months later, a super-powered baby is born.

The picture is structured with perfunctory carelessness, and even Carrey-phobes will admit that the uncharismatic Kennedy is no substitute for his predecessor. Nonetheless, the computer animators do have tremendous fun staging a delightfully violent battle between the psychotic baby and the demonic Jack Russell. There is - as the hero eventually realises - great potential for a series of animated shorts in that conflict.