Cast: Alex Pettyfer, April Pearson, Dimitri Leonidas, Calvin Dean, Tuppence Middleton
Director: Jon Wright
Screenwriters: Stephen Prentice

Debut screenwriter Stephen Prentice’s Tormented is, essentially, a 1970s slasher, only the nubile and often semi-nude college girls and guys of Nowheresville, USA, have been replaced with a snotty, brattish, yet never entirely believable, group of secondary school Brits: think Skins meets Friday the 13th and you’re on the right track.

Overweight and unable to stick up for himself, Darren Mullett (Calvin Dean) gets the brunt of his classmates’ attention, and it is not of the particularly well-meaning variety. He decides though, post-suicide, to return to wreak vengeance on those who teased and tormented him, using mobile phone messages from beyond the grave to send chills up their spines. Folks get bumped off in a variety of gruesome manners, and there are some slice n’ dice moments to make viewers squirm in their seats. However, for the most part, this British horror doesn’t quite live up to its promise.

Bullying and violence is an ever-growing concern for the teens and tweens of this country but it is never explored with any real pathos or understanding here, and it takes but the most cursory of looks at youth groups and subcultures, dividing the “tormentors” into social categories – the prom queen, the goth, the popular guy – that would make The Breakfast Club wince. Some of the horrific moments are competently staged, and the duo at the story’s centre – head girl Justine and her popular boyfriend Alexis – offer up some empathy in the face of the dim-witted vulgarity of the rest of their brethren. But this vulgarity comes as much from Prentice as it does his on-screen high school creations, and Tormented is, sadly, never quite as smart nor as witty as it would like to be.

DVD extras: Cast and director commentary, out-takes, deleted scenes and documentaries

Tormented is out on 28th September via 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

By Alasdair Morton