Head girl Justine has won a place at Oxford University and one of the most popular boys in school, Alexis, has asked her out. But his group of friends aren’t quite as cool as they appear. In fact they are a gang of merciless bullies who pick on anyone that doesn’t match up to their exacting standards. King of the in-crowd is vicious rich boy Bradley. And he and his ‘friends’ were responsible for bullying overweight asthmatic Darren Mullet to such an extent that he committed suicide. But death isn’t going to stop him from getting his own back. He sets about picking off the bullies one by one in a series of gruesome ways and Bradley and his friends discover there’s no reasoning with a dead geek.

Wright tries to make a virtue of his low budget when it comes to effects, ladling on the gore, so there are rivers of claret flowing across the screen. However, this damages the horror aspect of the film, making the deaths feel ludicrous instead of shocking. That being said, there is a decent scene with an eyeball, but I’m sure you’ll be able to see that on its own on YouTube soon enough. You can tell it is desperate to be the “Evil Dead” for the “Skins” generation, but fails because it can’t get the tone right. But what really undermines the film is the director’s lack of timing. He hits the gags too hard so it feels like he and his cast are begging the audience for laughs (it doesn’t help that many jokes are unoriginal). Meanwhile he makes a mess of the horror by pre-empting the supposedly scary moments, so you don’t jump when you should. There’s no tension, so the killings feel predictable and even the supernatural twist is handled with such a lack of surprise that it feels mundane, not to mention the fact that the killer is a kid painted greeny-grey – hardly an iconic figure. The pacing stutters between killings because Wright has no idea how to shoot dialogue or develop characters, making every event feel stilted. Consequently it’s an entirely inconsequential ninety-one minutes of poorly played schlock that brings nothing new to either the comedy or horror genres.

The characterisation is irreparably damaged by the lack of likeable characters. Even the supposedly goody-two-shoes Justine is too selfish to be sympathetic. Indeed all the teenage players are completely self-absorbed. Bradley is an arrogant rich kid who spends all his time making other peoples’ lives a misery. His girlfriend Tasha is a stuck-up bitch, her friends Sophie and Khallilah are Sloaney tag-alongs who bully out of boredom, while Marcus is the muscle and Alexis is the only slightly nice character whose interest in Justine is sadly just a lazy plot motor. The emos exist as melodramatic figures of fun whose obsession with death is clearly an affectation. The teachers are also gross stereotypes – the authoritarian headmaster who doesn’t take his pupils seriously, the dizzy art teacher and the vicious PE master who just wants to make the weaklings’ lives hell. As villains go, Darren Mullet is something of a let-down; his signature is his asthma inhaler, but beyond that, he just looks like a fat green kid. Okay, he may be remorseless, but his impassivity and the way he doesn’t even listen to his victims’ pleas makes him a rather bland addition to the canon of slasher movie bad guys. The dialogue reveals the screenwriter’s tin ear, suggesting he’s desperate to be down with the kids because none of it sounds natural or spontaneous. The characters swear for the sake of it and the insults are contrived.

The original music by Paul Hartnoll follows the current 80s trend with a score that mainly comprises synthesizer motifs slathered all over anything that is meant to be scary or exciting. These are interspersed with arrangements of reverberating percussion and echoing electric guitar. It adds to the sense of the movie being a throwback and feels like it has been ripped-off from an old John Carpenter score.