THE Baudelaire children have just had their first fortunate experience. The first three bedtime stories of fictitious author Lemony Snicket have been transformed into a wickedly humorous, picaresque screen adventure for a dark winter's day.

You may have expected the hand of Tim Burton to cast his cinematic spell over Snicket's disturbing Gothic tales, but the task goes to Brad Silberling, who casts rubber-bodied Jim Carrey in the central role of evil uncle Count Olaf. No doubt he is looking for more of scary Carrey's egomaniac magic from The Mask and The Grinch, and this erratic, experimental actor delivers in spades.

While Jude Law's honey-toned, yet deathly deadpan narrator - the Lemony Snicket of the title - taps away at his typewriter in the shadows, dropping acid drops of wit and wisdom, Count Olaf plots and plots again for the Baudelaire family fortune. The three children, quick-fix inventor Violet (Emily Browning), bookish clue solver Klaus (Liam Aiken) and wood-chewing little sister Sunny (twins Kara and Shelby Hoffman), are left homeless after their parents die in a suspicious house fire.

Their new guardian is Carrey's spindly Count Olaf, a Shakespe-arean ham actor with a decrepit mansion, a Rocky Horror wardrobe of tight-fitting suits, a shock of grey hair and a pointy chin. He could be a long-lost cousin of Richard E Grant's lush in Withnail And I, and he puts the children to work in the manner of the Ugly Sisters abusing Cinderella.

Only when he leaves them in a locked car on a railway crossing does Timothy Spall's glum, Dickensian lawyer, Mr Poe, see fit to take them from his unctuous clutches. Yet wherever they go, scheming Olaf will continue to haunt their every move, turning up in assorted slippery guises as misfortune befalls ever more distant and weird relations.

Whereas the gothic and Grimm Olaf is all laughs, Billy Connolly's avuncular herpetologist Uncle Monty and Meryl Streep's panic-stricken, barmy Aunt Josephine are no laughs, alas.

All the while in Silberling's episodic structure, the plucky orphans are trying to work out why their parents died, gathering pocket telescopes from each relative to establish a link. Astute rather than cute, the young actors are suitably offbeat yet engaging, closer in spirit to the Addams Family than the Harry Potter schoolchildren.

Burton or John Hughes would have made the humour far darker, but Silberling matches the mood of foreboding with set designs that echo fairground ghost rides and the Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings franchises yet have individual character too, with the use of silhouettes being particularly effective.

Do stay for the credit artwork, a wonder in itself, and be sure a sequel will ensue.

Updated: 16:08 Thursday, December 16, 2004