C'mon, admit it, we've all had the urge to kill the irritating inhabitants of the Big Brother houses in the never-ending stream of reality TV programmes.

So what better result than to let someone else do it for you...

It's no coincidence that the tensions between a random group of people (Rhona Cameron and Nigel Benn?) are the same as those mined for maximum terror value in classic spine-chillers.

Trapped in a house, you haven't got much choice but to row with your colleagues while an axe-wielding nutter painstakingly reduces the domestic overheads.

Welsh director Evans has skilfully utilised this reality TV premise to produce one of the scariest and certainly the most ingenious chiller of the year.

Five strangers spend six months in an isolated house in some unidentified American wasteland with the lure of $1m if they can go the distance.

Because it is shown on a live website, the whole movie is filmed on web cams, the only exception being shots taken from secret cameras hidden in places such as flashlights and shower-heads.

Rex (Lemche) is purely in it for the money, Danny (O'Reilly) is the awkward geek, Matt (Johnson) is the curiosity-filled college pin-up, Charlie (Sky) the vivacious flirt and Emma (Regan) the nervous wreck.

They appear to be rubbing along until "the company" starts playing games with them, apparently aimed at forcing them out. Because if one quits, they all lose.

It all starts innocently enough and can be explained away as practical jokes... but a when a bloodied hammer appears on Emma's pillow you know the stakes have been raised.

As the tension rises, the housemates lie and scheme in a desperate bid to lucratively keep each other in the house, but gradually the group dynamic warps into a wonderfully bleak scenario of mutual distrust.

Blair Witch Project set the camcorder tone, but Evans takes it a stage further, tapping into the shallow values and cynical manipulation of the celebrity generation.

Playing to our fundamentally selfish desires and voyeurish appetites, this boasts an intelligence and black wit seldom seen in contemporary chillers. Log on and scream.

Tim Evans