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Torment me not
In an isolated private school, away from the city, one student by the name of Daniel Mullet commits suicide. No one really knows what kind of person he was, because he’s the stereotypical nerd that no one really cares for. It turns out that his suicide, actually, has something to do with the school hierarchy. The popular group, made up of beautiful runts who look like they jumped out of a fashion magazine, has been relentlessly bullying him. He just couldn’t take it anymore. Really, has school become such hell?
Anyhow, Daniel, a chubby asthmatic, comes back from the grave and is determined to kill off all of them, via the most gruesome methods possible. Prissy girl Justine (Tuppence Middleton) used to be the girl Daniel had a major crush on and now she’s allowed access to the jet-set, so she’s in for a lot of the violence as well.
The problem here is that we really don’t care about any of the characters. Daniel the zombie is just as annoying as the popular kids who have bullied him. Frankly, we just wish that all of them would be immediately decapitated; it would be a favor to humanity. The dialogue is incredibly shallow and crass, I’m assuming there’s supposed to be some kind of dark humor hidden away in the umbrage, but it just never reaches the light of day.
Daniel, who has turned into a fat green monster resembling Shrek, looks like he’s a contestant in a primary school costume party with his poorly executed make-up. Whenever the poor boy comes on screen, we feel like letting out a soft chuckle, rather than enjoy the intimidation and possible empathy he might have summoned if he were in a different film. Bullying has always been a favorite subject of the revenge genre; in fact, the film “Carrie” depicted this experience with brilliant psychological terror, matched with its ability to make the viewer identify with the lead character, for we were all “Carries” on one day or another. It’s a shame that “Tormented” cannot muster up its potential.
Beyond the god-awful acting and the bad make-up, the film is so poorly directed, mostly due to bad timing and dull editing choices, that at one point I wondered whether I was watching a slasher film that was supposed to scare the living daylights out of me, or a mid-day soap opera that ones watches while ironing the laundry. These mass-produced horror films count too much on the effects of their predecessors in drawing the attention of audiences. Even the special effects appear to be done in a fifth grade art room.
One might not expect too much from slasher flicks; the genre is obvious in its limits of thematic depth and mainly functions to address our primal need for fear, rather than our intellectual or emotional dendrites. But, at least one would expect some sort of cinematic craftsmanship! Or at least a good editor could have saved the day.
At this point, I’d like to draw your attention to your DVD player. If you would thoroughly like to enjoy decent trash for the purposes of worthy entertainment, there’s always Wes Craven’s “Scream.” Now here’s a film in which everything is done right: The dark comedy is clever, the characters are not cardboard figures, the thrill factor is impeccably executed and furthermore, the film not only transgresses the horror genre, but takes it to a new level of innovation.
As for “Tormented,” it truly torments its viewers, but for all the wrong reasons. All we can hope for is that they don’t make a sequel.
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