In 1977, Bradford was not the only city held hostage to fear.

While Peter Sutcliffe stalked the streets and ginnels of Manningham, towards the beginning of his reign, a similarly insidious presence was making itself felt in New York.

David Berkowitz, a fat postal worker with the smile of a baby but the mindset of a monster, conducted an indiscriminate shooting spree that left, over the course of a year, six people dead.

Of course, no-one knew Berkowitz's name until the end. They called him instead by the alias he used on the notes with which he taunted the police: Son of Sam.

The knowledge that an uncaptured serial killer could be the person sitting next to you on the bus, or the man facing you across the office floor, creates, as anyone who was in Bradford in the late Seventies will testify, a very palpable sense of fear. It is this force that has motivated Spike Lee's atmospheric and oppressive new drama.

Summer of Sam is essentially a tale of retribution; of the need to find a scapegoat. It is also a morality tale about the sometimes misplaced sense of community that times of panic instil.

Lee sets his story in the Italian quarter of the Bronx, a place inhabited by a sort of cut-price Mafiosi: hot-headed post-adolescents whose appalling taste in hairstyles and clothes is matched only by their general lack of anything resembling common sense.

This was, the columnist Jimmy Breslin reminds us in the film's preface, a different time. Morals were different; the Sixties had liberated New Yorkers sexually and AIDS had not yet reined them back in. White men dressed like John Travolta and black men wore their Afros like head-dresses.

Inhabiting such a world we find the gum-chewing Vinny (John Leguizamo). Vinny is married to Dionna (Mira Sorvino), who promised to take him for better or worse, but is discovering day by day that he is worse than she thought.

Vinny is easily led, and not only by his groin. Hanging out on the banks of the Hudson with similarly-inclined acquaintances, he finds himself drawn into a vigilante hunt for the Son of Sam. This self-righteous and misguided attempt at community policing produces a ludicrously-flawed investigation in which the spotlight of suspicion falls on Vinny's friend Ritchie (Adrien Brody), a punk-rocker whose haircut is even more outlandish than those of Vinny's other friends. If the characters are untypical of Spike Lee, their motivations - sex, revenge, and the desire to break out of an ethnic ghetto - are familiar. And there is much characteristic detail in subplots concerning Vinny's infidelity with his boss (Bebe Neuwirth), and Ritchie's double-life as a dancer in a gay club.

We do see the shadowy Berkowitz through all this: his private rages in his shed of an apartment are a counterpoint to the overboiling drama on the hot summer streets.

The final scenes, in which the police flaunt their suspect before the TV cameras, provides another counterpoint, this time to what happened here - when the pre-trial face of Peter Sutcliffe was forbidden to be seen by anyone not present at Dewsbury Magistrates' Court.

Berkowitz pleaded insanity at his trial, arguing that a 200-year-old dog had ordered him to kill. But he was found to be bad, not mad, and languishes in jail to this day.

Lee does not dwell on the man; his message, if he has one at all, is that when evil remains unmasked, everyone in its wake is its victim. That was true of New York just as it was true of Bradford.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.