Directed By Jon Wright
Starring Alex Pettyfer, Tuppence Middleton, Dimitri Leonidas and April Pearson.
Marketed as Skins with exponentially more teen disembowings, Tormented follows the spoilt and malicious teens blessed with popularity at Fairview High in the aftermath of bullied kid Darren Mullet’s suicide. Not long after the funeral, the clique who tormented Mullet starts getting not-so-mysteriously deaded.
The horror-comedy genre’s a tough genre to nail perfectly, and it’s rare that a filmmaker can handle one of the two genres alone, let alone in perfect synchronicity with the deft touch of John Landis or Edgar Wright. Tormented fails on both fronts; when the comedy’s not slumming in puerile dick-and-fart gag territory, it’s aiming for a scathingly funny depiction of school cliques that it doesn’t have the intelligence or perceptiveness to pull off (the eye-rolling emo/goth kid caricatures are especially painful to watch). Heathers this surely isn’t.
While the death scenes are certainly messy, they’re free from inventive creativity and drowned in cheap prosthetics and fake blood that seems to have been snatched from the local McDonalds dip selection, managing to be laughable for none of the intended reasons. The film’s overweight ghost/zombie villain, as well as seeming like a rejected skit from an entry in the Scary Movie franchise, is a shambling mess of plotholes and baffling incoherence; a vague question mark of an entity, his abilities and the nature of his resurrection shift randomly to serve the plot – he’s given undead strength by an inhaler (!) and, like a low-rent, ghostly Inspector Gadget, he even has magically-appearing swimming goggles, should the paddling occasion arise.
The cast are suitably attractive, but when lumped with vapid, insufferable, black holes of personality instead of characters, none of the actors makes a worthwhile impression. Tuppence Middleton and Dimitri Leonidas fare best of all, as Head Girl seduced by popularity Justine and her new In-Crowd boyfriend Alexis, respectively; they’re cute, and borderline likeable, but even they’re saddled with unbearably dull characters as the runtime wears on. Alex Pettyfer is given the unfortunate task of playing Bradley – someone so smarmy, entitled and loathsome that he redefines the term “douchebag”. He’s supposed to be an intimidating bully, but instead is a thinly-drawn pastiche of ‘80s jock stereotypes, and every moment he’s on-screen we’re left wondering when he’ll wander off to hassle teenage John Cusack or hang out with the Cobra Kai. Detestable, shallow teens as the leads of a horror movie is far from a bad notion – on the contrary, the satisfaction of seeing insipid assclowns being messily punched apart by unstoppable killers has long been the driving force behind the slasher genre. However, when the villain and leads alike are equally as uninteresting and the mayhem entirely bereft of creativity, the whole experience is about as fun as liver cancer.
Writer Stephen Prentice clearly strives for some sly social commentary amidst the bloodshed, and while the subject matter – teens driven to suicide by malicious bullying – is surely prime fodder, Tormented tackles the issue with the subtlety of a Hulk fist to the anal cavity; the film’s frequent bouts into heavy-handed moralizing are bathed in the same ham-fisted After School Special mentality that plagued Eden Lake, and while mostly played for satirical laughs, are painfully unfunny and devoid of anything resembling insight.
It’s a film that clearly tries to rope in the Skins audience, but Tormented’s shallow, cheap and laughably dull hi-jinks are closer to A Stabtastic Adventure at St. Trinian’s than E4’s staple show. 14 year olds might have a ball with it, but anyone else is better off avoiding the film entirely.
Rating:
Tormented is available to buy now on DVD in the UK.
(Review cross-posted from WRAW Reviews)