Director Roland Emmerich has spent half his career trying to obliterate planet Earth and humankind with it in blockbusters such as Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, a film which imagined the return of the Ice Age. Emmerich's brain must still be frozen - that's the only explanation for the dreadful dialogue, risible plotting and wafer-thin characterisation in 10,000 BC, a rollicking journey through the dawn of time, which stampedes historical and geographical accuracy under the hooves of a herd of belligerent woolly mammoths (or "manuk" as they are called here).

Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser, who also composed the film's deafening score, fling a spear through subtlety with the opening lines of Omar Sharif's narration - "Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend . . ." - revealing a discomfiting truth: everyone involved is taking this nonsense seriously. Admittedly there are a couple of light comic interludes but the vast majority of the laughs are unintentional, like a curious episode with a sabre-tooth tiger (known here as "spear tooth"), which mirrors the fable of Androcles and the lion.

On the snowy peaks of a Siberian mountain range, the Yagahl tribe unites in the face of adversity, awaiting the arrival of a child with blue eyes as decreed in ancient legend. Sure enough, such a whippersnapper arrives and blossoms into the beautiful, headstrong Evolet (Camilla Belle). She falls in love with warrior D'Leh (Steven Strait), a fretful young man with impressive pecs and a fine head of dreadlocks, and is then kidnapped by an evil warlord (Affif Ben Badra) and his marauding clan. Determined to save his beloved, D'Leh joins forces with his mentor Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis) on a perilous quest into the great unknown.

10,000 BC might be good entertainment if it treated each absurd detour with a knowing wink and a smile, but Emmerich and Kloser are far too absorbed in projecting this simple rites of passage story (the young pretender's rise to noble leader) on to the widest possible canvas. Thus, D'Leh and his brethren gallivant across ice-laden peaks, sweltering desert and lush, tropical forest, clashing with a flock of giant, carnivorous chicken for a laughable chase through the undergrowth.

Production design is impressive, even if some of the computer effects work is unconvincing and the final showdown a huge anti-climax. Strait's most outstanding feature is his chest, overshadowing what little work he does with his face to reflect his boy hero's exertions. His accent is completely different from that of the vapid Belle, who spends most of the film squinting through contact lenses. Badra is a promising diversion as the bad guy, who whips the heroine into submission by snarling, "I like your spirit but I will have to break it." Ours is broken at roughly the same time and no amount of silly prophecies, human sacrifices or mammoth stampedes can revive it.

Every once in a while, an exciting British talent emerges from nowhere, searing onto our memory with a work of audacity and invention. Two years ago, Paul Andrew Williams was that saviour with his impressive debut, London To Brighton, an explosive thriller about a prostitute and an 11-year-old girl on the run from a gun-toting pimp. What the film lacked in budget it made up for in blistering performances from a largely unknown cast, taut direction and elegant scripting.

Needless to say, Williams's follow-up arrives with a huge amount of expectation. Sad to say, The Cottage falls woefully short of his first film, awkwardly melding stomach-churning horror and black humour without a firm grasp on either strand.

Reece Shearsmith from The League of Gentleman is cast as the dithering and clumsy hero, a supposedly comic foil to Andy Serkis's snarling partner in crime, a role he could play in his sleep - and possibly does in this soporific mess. When Serkis isn't drifting off, we certainly are, despite regular explosions of grisly violence running the gamut of impalement, decapitation and dismemberment.

Bickering brothers David (Serkis) and Peter (Shearsmith) hope to get rich quick by kidnapping gangster's daughter Tracey (Jennifer Ellison) then milking her old man, Arnie, for the ransom money. However, Tracey is no pushover - she head butts Peter, breaking his nose, and is only silenced when David gags her and ties her to the bed. The frosty atmosphere thaws slightly when the brothers receive news that Tracey's misfit stepbrother, Andrew (Steve O'Donnell), who is part of their scheme, has been dispatched with the ransom money.

He arrives soon after but there's a hitch and David leaves to make a telephone call in the nearby village.

Then all hell breaks loose. Tracey turns the tables on her captors, knocking Andrew unconscious and dragging weakling Peter into the woods in the dead of night.

David gives chase with a still-dazed Andrew in tow, stumbling upon an old farmhouse, home to a maniacal loner with a taste for human blood.

The Cottage bears none of the hallmarks of Williams's glittering debut.

Tension evaporates early on, pacing is sluggish and characters are screaming caricatures who grate on our nerves so badly, we're cheering in the aisles when the deranged farmer starts hacking them to pieces.

Performances are lacklustre and the gag with Peter's harridan wife runs its course well before the hen-pecked fool is strung up on a meat hook minus a few digits.

True to form, Peter, David and co stumble to their doom without much resistance, ignoring the warnings of the villagers: "Make sure you lock your doors. Strangers don't fare well in these parts."

That would be an understatement.

If you can be bothered to stay behind until the end of the credits, you'll be 'rewarded' with an additional scene with Tracey's father.