Why Bullying Is Bad: A Review Of Tormented (2009)

Yell! Magazine’s review of Tormented (2009):

What do you get when you mix Skins, Friday the 13th, and every K-horror having to do with school girls and vengeance? You get Tormented, a 2009 British horror flick that I hesitate to call a straight up romcomzom.

The movie opens with head girl (not just a clever mockery of a title; it’s more or less like your typical class president, but with babysitting duty) Justine Fielding (Tuppence Middleton, no relation to Kate and Pippa) being escorted from Fairview High School by the police as the rest of the student body looks on. The movie then takes the flashback route to five days ago when Justine was reading an eulogy at the funeral of fellow student, Darren Mullet. No wonder he killed himself with a name like that, right? Case closed! No, but wait. There’s more.

As Justine eulogizes the poor bastard, his mousy, wonky-haired friend Jason Banks (Olly Alexander) stands up and has an outburst, saying that she doesn’t know jack shit about the dead student. He’s promptly thrown out of the church even though he kind of has a point. Goody two-shoes Justine is approached by popular heart-throb Alexis (Dimitri Leonidas) after the funeral, amidst a somewhat confusing smattering of small talk from the goths, geeks, and elite students of Fairview (with the goths making atypical comments like, “I love funerals, death is so beautiful!”) who asks her to a party, much to the chagrin of his jerk-ass friends. Like a lamb to slaughter, Justine immediately ditches her nerdy friends and makes plans to hang with the in-crowd.

Yeah, because that sort of thing always goes really well for everyone, movie or not. Upon arriving, Justine is immediately humiliated at the command of alpha-bitch Tasha (April Pearson, Skins). The chav (for those of you who are British slang illiterate, this is our equivalent of white trash) DJ does a degrading rap about Justine that naturally sends her fleeing from the party. Alexis chases after her and persuades her to come back, but not before having the offending DJ thrown out of the party by handsome dickweed Bradley (Alex Pettyfer, I Am Number Four).

After being coerced back to the party, Alexis and Justine start doing what would have them dead immediately in any other film, but they’re supposed to be our two sympathetic leads, so they’re spared a little longer. While they’re in the delicate process of trying to lick away each other’s teeth, Bradley, Tasha, footballer Marcus (Tom Hopper), blonde ditz Sophie (Georgia King), and petite bruiser Khalillah (Larissa Wilson, Skins) are all being sent threatening text messages from Mullet’s cell phone number. He tells them that they’re all going to die, as you might expect, using what I can only describe as the most pathetic Zynga smiley faces to date and childish insults that for some reason rile our popular crowd. And so our movie effectively begins!

Rather than bore you with the details of the banal plot of this movie, I’m going to move right into telling you what I didn’t like about it. Yes, me, your resident “see this movie now!” girl, actually disliked a movie she’s reviewing. We can all mark this day in history.

Continue reading the Tormented review on the jump…