Tormented (From Worcester News)

Tormented

11:24am Sunday 31st May 2009

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British Horror is a genre particularly close to my heart.

The last few years has seen a trend of fantastically written, well-executed films that will stand the test of time. Films such as Eden Lake (2008) turned horror’s self-reflexive eye on itself and brought the numerous scares from our constant fear of youth, not from the supernatural place that so many horrors in the past drew their villains.

It is odd then that Tormented has taken a very traditional route.

Ignoring the likes of Eden Lake, Donkey Punch (2008) or even the sub-human horror of The Decent (2005); Tormented takes an explicitly American teen slasher and transposes it onto the youth of England. Not only is the set up distinctly American, with Alex Pettyfer looking increasingly like a surfer, the class and social divide between the teen groups is more 80’s than it is 00’s.

There are Jocks, Goths and geeks; all of which will seem increasingly shallow to any audience member who has been to school in the past ten years.

The plot of Tormented follows a well-trodden route; a young man is driven to suicide by bullies, and then (for a perversely unexplained reason) returns from the grave to exact gruesome murder upon his tormentors.

And it is within this very plot that faults begin to appear: for example the reason why Mullet (Calvin Dean) rises from the grave is explained, but never how.

Much of the cast seem to just accept that a zombie ghost (and particularly benign and silly looking one at that) is killing their friends.

My main problem with Tormented is the same problem that I have with many films and television series that try to show school life in England: that many of them can never work out what they want to do.

Whether Tormented is trying to show the harsh reality of an important issue like bullying, trying to make the audience laugh at the absurdity of the death scenes or trying to create a tense and scary filmic experience; it fails on all counts because of its problematic identity crisis.

(With thanks to Odeon, Foregate Street, Worcester)

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