Yes, horror fans, it's another one of those shockers where stupid, beautiful, people do stupid things that turn ugly.

The vicious 1980 original, starring Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis, emptied a blood bank, such was the flow of rhesus negative from the limbs of its young victims.

This new version - which really only has the title in common - is positively anaemic with most of the gruesome slayings tamely taking place off camera. It's a horror film for people who don't like horror.

Brittany Snow plays Donna, a troubled teen unsurprisingly traumatised by the brutal murder of her family by obsessed, knife-wielding teacher Richard Fenton (Schaech).

Doughty trouper that she is, Donna's managed to put the past behind her and is looking forward to her senior prom on the tuxedo-clad arm of Alpha Jock Bobby (Porter).

However, Fenton has broken out of his high-security asylum and is heading back to school...and the unsuspecting love of his twisted life.

You'd have thought that first-time director Nelson McCormick could have brought something fresh to this hackneyed genre...but it's stale old formulaic fare.

Scenes from previous, far superior, horror movies are shoehorned into the action - Friday The Thirteenth, Halloween, Carrie, in a roll-call of dull routine.

The only bright spot is British actor Idris Elba's hardbitten cop, a character of relative depth among the one-dimensional cut-outs getting sliced in hotel corridors.

There's a palpable lack of tension (we know who the killer is from the off), a dizzying dearth of imagination (plenty of slayings in louvred closets of behind shower curtains) and a cast you curse rather than care for.

Annoyingly, it's a rich premise that offers all sorts of possibilities...yet McCormick doesn't appear to be bothered.

Tim Evans