CHRISTMAS: a time of woe, man-eating leeches, attempted murder, terrible fires, giant snakes and Jim Carrey at his diabolical best.

Such are the wicked delights of Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events, a macabre adaptation of the first three books in Daniel Handler's best-selling series: The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window.

Director Brad Silberling and screenwriter Robert Gordon remain faithful to the books, which continue the tradition of the Brothers Grimm and Roald Dahl by inflicting absurdly awful misfortune on perfectly nice children.

The doomed youngsters in question are the three Baudelaire siblings: 14-year-old Violet (Emily Browning), 12-year-old brother Klaus (Liam Aiken) and their baby sister Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman).

Violet loves to invent, Klaus is a voracious bookworm and Sunny... well, the youngest loves to bite things. It's quite a talent.

When their beloved parents perish in a fire, the children are shepherded off to live with their distant relative, Count Olaf (Carrey), who desperately wants to get his greedy paws on the Baudelaire family fortune. So he plots and schemes to kill the children.

After Olaf's first failed attempt, the officious Mr Poe (Timothy Spall) removes the Baudelaires from the Count's so-called care and takes them to live instead with oddball guardians Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly) and Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep). However, Olaf is not to be dissuaded from his task and he enlists the help of a motley crew of misfits to send them to an early grave.

Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events looks absolutely stunning.

From the marvellous animated opening titles to the inventive closing credits, production designer Rick Heinrichs and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who worked together on Sleepy Hollow, conjure a forbidding, other-worldly parallel universe of rickety cliff-side houses and decrepit mansions.

It's a visual tour-de-force, complemented by subtle use of computer-generated special effects and Colleen Atwood's beautiful costume designs.

Inevitably, Carrey's larger-than-life performance pervades every frame and once again he contorts, ad-libs and sneers to hilarious effect.

The role allows him to don a series of outrageous disguises, posing as a salty peg-legged sailor and a deranged lab assistant.

Carrey runs amok, a little too much in some scenes, momentarily breaking the film's heady spell, but as Olaf, he's a perfect pantomime villain.

The children in my audience giggled and gasped right on cue. The young performers are excellent and there is strong support from Connolly, Spall and Streep, the latter in great form as a woman absolutely terrified of everything.

Horribly good fun for all.

Rating: 8/10