tale.

Set in Cardiff, Wales it will doubtless be described as Trainspotting for the pill-popping generation.

The story is a simple one -- five friends get together for their weekend kicks.

They are all drawn together by a common love of music and this film will strike a chord for anyone who grew up in Britain during the 1990s.

Acid, house, hip-hop, jungle -- I expect it's all there but I haven't a clue which is which -- I was a home watching Match of the Day.

It was robotic music for people in robotic jobs -- and so it is with this handful -- who live just for their weekly hit of clubs, pubs, parties and drugs.

There are all the stereotypes -- white guys from unfashionable regions wearing woolly hats and trying to talk in Jamaican accents.

There is Jip -- the sexually constipated store assistant while his mate Koop worries his flirty girlfriend Nina is suffering from sexual incontinence.

Mofty is their mad mate who keeps them and the rest of Cardiff's twenty-somethings supplied with enough pills and powders to keep a chemist going for a month.

Lulu is the wild card -- she's Jip's best mate but will they get together? Oh guess what -- they do.

But I'm not spoiling things as it's not plot or action which make this so entertaining -- it's the constantly bubbling humour, fed by Ally McBeal-style fantasy sequences.

When Nina walks out on her burger bar job she is pictured making a speech to waiting press men revealing that she is glad to be joining the two-million fellow jobless and have the chance get into some serious daytime TV viewing.

Wales's one and only drug guru -- the legendary Howard Marks who made millions selling cannabis before being busted and writing a bestseller -- crops up in a cameo role to give a commentary about the etiquette of blagging a puff on a joint from a stranger. But as you would expect from a film based around drug taking, sex and swearing there are precious few scenes which are translatable in a family newspaper. So I certainly won't tell you about the scene involving Mofty who is caught in a rather delicate moment when his mother walks in on him bearing a cup of tea.

That's not to say Human Traffic is anyway coarse -- far from it. Director Justin Kerrigan's writing is earthy and witty and carried off with some panache.

Occasionally the pace drags a little -- giving you the distinct impression that those scenes were left to the actors to improvise.

But that's a minor grip -- Human Traffic is a sure-fire hit about all that drug-induced mayhem.

Matthew Taylor MOVIES MPC