I’m wondering if one of the reasons production company Slingshot is so named is because of the whole David/Goliath thing.  If so, Tormented is testimony to the aptness of the christening, better than many much higher budgeted shockers I’ve seen emerge from America.

The story is simple enough.  A bullied kid kills himself, and returns from the grave to exact revenge on his tormentors.  Not rocket science, but then it doesn’t need to be: the whole point is to deliver a low budget horror film, and the team behind Tormented do so with panache.  That’d be pan-ache, the misery you get from being whacked in the face with kitchen utensils: no fancy French vocab here.

Writer Stephen Prentice gets the feel of school bang on, even if everything’s necessarily exaggerated to fit the genre and time available.  The tribal gatherings of different pupils are caricatures, but there’s no harm in that.  What’s surpringly well done is the whole business of bullying, the genuine evil with which teenagers can behave to each other.  And that’s important, because if we don’t sympathise with the victim — even his name, Darren Mullet, is ill-fated — then we won’t relish his revenge nearly as much.

And what revenge!  The fat boy zombie wreaks havoc among the in crowd, starting with a startling underwater entrance when he dons goggles before sitting on a female tormentor at the bottom of a pool until she karks it.  Then there’s the girl whose hands he guillotines off, and the dimwit whose head he impales on the school railings.  The only off-kilter retribution is of an emo pseud whose hearing Mullet obliterates: wouldn’t it have been more effective to have some hint of the noise the Sandman wannabe was subjected to?

Holding the unpleasantness together is a well-structured tale of a head girl who falls in with Mullet’s chief tormentors: she could have saved him at his hour of greatest need, but was preoccupied with getting the news of her place at Oxford to study Law.  And she makes the mistake of falling for one of the most egregious offenders.  This riles Mullet beyond the point of endurance: she’d been the apple of his eye, now she turns out to be just another teenage girl he’d never have a chance with.

Director Jon Wright’s choices are at the least functional, and often more than that, the film intelligently put together while fully aware of the market it exists in.  There’s some humour from the cineaste girls, big Keira Knightley fans: they’d not be seen dead watching Tormented. 

I’m not sure whether one curious choice is Wright’s or Prentice’s: why is it that the zombie Mullet needs an asthma inhaler, when surely he doesn’t need to breathe any more?  And that’s not just me being a zombie geek: it’s been demonstrated in the swimming pool scene.  Maybe the inhaler has totemic significance, whatever that means.  At any rate, it didn’t convince me, but that’s a very minor point in what was a highly entertaining film.

I admire what Tormented’s creators have devised: there’s a market for low budget horror to amuse teens, and I’d rather it was satisfied by witty and refreshing British films like this than some of the garbage we import from America.  Fingers crossed for more along these lines, whether from Slingshot, Warp X, or whoever else is planning to make anything of this nature.