The ornaments he wore, the bracelet and the shining breastplate, did indeed seem to be polished fragments of a hjjk's hard carapace, a grisly touch.

This robust old-fashioned adventure should appeal to older children, but beware of a few needlessly grisly touches (Maslin).

In one of the grisliest anti-Iran touches in the book, the young Iranian, who is more at home in London, returns to his native country to see the Gateway to Heaven Cemetery, where a Fountain of Blood spouts red.

It includes the above-mentioned grisly touches.

It includes bloody fights, grisly touches, sexual situations and nudity, profanity and assorted intentional gross-out shocks, including the rendering of human fat into soap.

The cinematography, by Roger Deakins, is as toothsome as homemade praline, and there are the requisite grisly touches: a severed finger that becomes a cat toy, a spate of sudden fatalities at the end.

A rather spectacular combination of toad and lizard, with a few other grisly touches, is about as close as you can get to a general description.