Tormented (1½ Stars)

This is my Halloween Challenge film #16. As you can see by my rating, I'm not very happy with it. It's very rare that I watch a film and then forget it. I mean totally forget it. I know I bought this film six years ago, in summer 2010, shortly before I started writing this blog. I remember that I bought it because it was filmed locally, most of the scenes set in Bishop Vesey's Grammar School in Sutton Coldfield. That's the school my nephew Chris went to. But if you had asked me a few hours ago what the film's about I wouldn't have been able to say a single word in reply.

Now that I've watched it again I can see why I forgot it. It's exceedingly dull, and if I don't write a few words about the plot I'll forget it again.

It's about five days in the life of a high school, in particular the life of the school's head girl Justine Fielding. A boy called Darren Mullet has just killed himself. She holds a speech at the memorial service saying that he was much loved and will be dearly missed by everyone, but the truth is that she didn't even know him. She's all the more shocked when she's given a suicide note in which Darren wrote that he loved her. She tries to find out about him. He was a fat boy who was always bullied by the other children. They even made fun of him because of his feelings for Justine. They knew about it, but she didn't, she was so wrapped up in her own little world.

Now the children who mocked and bullied Darren are receiving threatening text messages from his phone. They aren't empty threats. The ones who bullied or made fun of Darren are slaughtered one by one.

So what's wrong with the film? I have nothing against slasher films. They can be very entertaining if done well. The film has a reasonable body count for the genre: eight brutal deaths, including six of the children in the picture above. I think that the problem is that when someone got killed I just didn't care. The boys who got killed were bullies who deserved what they got. The girls were air-headed bimbos who were little more than love slaves of the bullies. The only good person in the film is Justine (second from the right in the picture), but she was so boring that I didn't care what happened to her.

The film was a total failure at the box office, earning less than $350,000. I'm surprised to see that it's still available on DVD when much better films like "Uprising" and "Tag" aren't on sale. In Germany there's even a Blu-ray release. I'll tell you where to buy the film, but I honestly can't recommend it.

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