Alex continues to be TORMENTED by British horror comedies!
British horror has been in genre reinvention mode for the last few years now. The results so far have been mixed, from the fantastic rom-com take on Romeroesque zombies in Shaun of the Dead to the dire Lesbian Vampire Killers, a wet dream rehash of the Hammer Horror classics released last month. The latest instalment is Tormented, which brings the slasher-movie-with-a-comedy-twist into an English Grammar School for the first time ever. 
The films plot borrows heavily from genre classics such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and more recent Hollywood hits like I Know What You Did Last Summer. Secondary school outcast Darren Mullet (played by Calvin Dean) comes back from the dead after being bullied into suicide by the students of Fairview High. His objective surprise, surprise is to wreak bloody revenge on the leading members of each of the schools tribes. In-crowders, emos and nerds, all must pay for the emotional damage they inflicted upon him. But will he spare his platonic love, Head Girl Justine Fielding (Tuppence Middleton)? The short answer is: who cares? Granted, Ms. Middleton is impressively sure of herself as the goody two-shoes lead. Much the same can be said of the rest of the young cast, many of whom have been recruited from the same television series (Skins) which gave Slumdog MillionairesDev Patel his start in acting. And director Jon Wrights feature-length debut is crisp and up-to-date work, with apt handling of set pieces and gore. Yet, unfortunately, there are at least three key ingredients missing which will in all likelihood prevent a positive audience reaction to the movie. Firstly, Mullet is not a particularly scary or memorable homicidal monster. Memorable slasher baddies such as Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger each have something special about them, whether it be their attire, their weapon of choice or some quirk in their evil modus operandi. Mullet is a blend of zombie, ghost and schoolboy, but he looks more clumsy than menacing. The film half-heartedly tries to use this clumsiness for comic effect, which comes off as well, half-hearted. The rest of the comedy is mainly supplied by the wisecracks and putdowns exchanged between the snotty teenagers. Maybe its because Im getting on in years, but the films brand of humour never once got me to laugh out loud and only occasionally made me smile. More importantly, the movie doesnt seem to take a coherent stance on what Mullet is doing: should we root for the bullied victim in his hour of revenge or commiserate with the charmless adolescents he preys on? There is a faint whiff of a missed opportunity hanging over writer Stephen Prentices work in this respect. Although it deals effectively with the role of modern technology (mobile phones, websites) in current forms of peer pressure, the story always manages to steer clear of any real engagement with the issue of bullying, which is simplistically ascribed to teen boredom. For instance, how much more interesting would it have been to portray school bullying as a cruder version of the control which every society exerts over its members? In the end Tormented decides that such explorations of the problem are not commercial enough to even consider. As such it is happy to be just another horror comedy, only mildly funny or scary, which exploits a real social and ethical problem as a dramatic backdrop without ever really taking it seriously. In terms of its place in this new wave of British horror reimaginations it therefore stands squarely in the middle between the extremes of very good (Shaun) and atrociously bad (LVK).
Tormented opens in the U.K. on May 22nd and is currently expected to be released on July 10th in the U.S. 