Tormented
Jon Wright directs a tongue-in-cheek horror set in a British comprehensive school where a gang of bullying students gets its just desserts at the hands of a most unlikely avenger.
Jon Wright directs a tongue-in-cheek horror set in a British comprehensive school where a gang of bullying students gets its just desserts at the hands of a most unlikely avenger.
Not a demented dinner lady, fed up with gripes about her chicken cobbler, but the spectre of a tragically abused boy, who skulks in classrooms, toilets and corridors, picking off his prey one at a time.
Unfortunately, the gore - and there is plenty including some bloodthirsty dismemberment - sits uncomfortably next to the largely intentional giggles.
Screenwriter Stephen Prentice fails to seamlessly meld the two strands, spinning a familiar and predictable yarn in which characters of loose morals are marked for death before the first clumsy line of dialogue trips off their pierced tongues.
Academically blessed head girl Justine (Tuppence Middleton) leads the funeral tributes to classmate Darren Mullet (Calvin Dean), unaware of the circumstances surrounding his death.
Thankfully, the truth emerges, little by little, when teenager charmer Alexis (Dimitri Leonidas) makes romantic overtures and introduces Justine to the other members of his gang: Bradley (Alex Pettyfer) and Marcus (Tom Hopper), two of the most popular guys in school, Khalillah (Larissa Wilson), Sophie (Georgia King) and Tasha (April Pearson).
At first, the cool kids are wary of the pretty yet aloof Justine.
'You're like Princess Diana of this dump,' quips one classmate.
It transpires that Bradley, Marcus and co mercilessly taunted and teased their asthmatic, overweight classmate, literally bullying Darren to his grave.
While the rest of the community is plunged into mourning, these six manipulative friends shed crocodile tears.
Justine is horrified when Darren's murderous ghost targets the students who made his life a misery, leaving blood and entrails in his wake.
Little does the head girl realize she too played a part in Darren's death.
Opening with a central character being hauled out of school, spattered in blood, Tormented takes perverse pleasure in eviscerating the protagonists.
One uncouth fellow, who doesn't think twice about urinating on graves in the local churchyard in the dead of night, is swiftly dispatched with a handy shovel.
Can we dig it? Well, he certainly does, six feet under.
The young victims seem to have a death wish, gift-wrapping their own demise by splitting up, swimming late at night in the school pool or, worst of still, attempting to clamber over spiked railings which surround the school yard.
Evidently, the students exist in a vacuum and have never seen the Scream series or any number of Asian horror films festooned with marauding ghoulies, which set out the guidelines to survive such an attack.
Unrealistic prosthetics and an absence of any scares dull the horror strand of Prentice's screenplay while humour settles for the puerile.
The title of Wright's film is a misnomer - when the end credits roll, we're not remotely disturbed.
Release Date: Friday 22 May 2009
Certificate: 15
Runtime: 91mins
