This woefully derivative film’s sheer audacity is staggering. It steals its entire concept, look and plot from the Saw films and what miniscule proportion of the film that doesn’t draw from Saw is filled with rip offs from the sort of reality TV based films that were popular four or five years ago (My Little Eye etc). It is incredible that somebody could have the temerity to even claim to have written this, such is the scale of its larceny yet that is exactly what director Andy Hurst has done. Perhaps it should not be surprising that he has churned out a work of such awesome unoriginality when his previous writing credits, which include straight to DVD sequels to both Single White Female and Wild Things are taken into account.

The film begins as it means to go on with a scene in which a young woman wakes up to find her hands tied behind her back and that she is wearing some sort of electric torture collar. Cameras track her every movement and a distorted ominous voice commands her to press two switches within a certain amount of time. The catch is that to get to the first switch she must walk barefoot across broken glass while the second switch is at the bottom of a tank of water she must plunge her face into to reach. Oh, hang on though, that’s not actually water in the tank – can you guess what it really is? In truth this isn’t a bad scene, it’s tense, grim and genuinely horrific, it just happens to belong to a different movie.

As the film begins in proper we are introduced to the group of unfortunates who are to be the meat for this particular grinder. These people, it must be said, rank amongst the absolute dumbest characters ever written. Despite having been knocked unconscious, kidnapped and in one case actually been subjected to surgery they still seem to believe that this is all just a television show. Perhaps this is a satirical comment on the intelligence of the sort of people who appear on reality television but then again, perhaps it’s just really bad writing. These people are so mind-blisteringly, suicidally stupid that they quite happily strap and handcuff themselves into a sheeted industrial looking contraption without so much as even considering that a little peek under the dust sheet might not be such a bad idea. These people deserve all they get, which in this case happens to be having their damn brains drilled out. Good.

The dialogue these blathering idiots spout easily matches the stupidity of their behaviour and is similarly inane. In one large cluster of bald exposition one character tells somebody she has only just met how her biggest fear is that people will discover her ‘secret’. She goes on to mention this secret several more times throughout the film. This really makes you question the logic of why somebody who is mortally afraid of people finding out her secret would insist on going around telling everybody she meets that she even has one.

During a few brief moments of reprieve from the idiocy of the cretins locked up in the warehouse there is a subplot about a couple of detectives on the trail of the evil not-at all-similar-to-Jigsaw-oh-no-wait-exactly-the-bloody-same genius at the bottom of all this. Their investigation is a lazily written farce which mostly consists of them being given an address by somebody and then going there. It is hard to determine what function these characters fulfil, as their actions have virtually no bearing on the rest of the movie. They seem to be there just to babble on about the killer’s motivations and intelligence. Their storyline concludes with the two of them raiding the known mass-murdering madman’s lair with absolutely no back-up whatsoever. Ludicrous doesn’t even cover it.

The strange thing about Are You Scared is that its generous helpings of utter crapness somehow don’t entirely render it a bad movie. It is not a good movie but it is competently directed, well-paced and at times pretty gruesome. Sure, it lacks originality, story, tension, drama and good acting but if you can overlook all that you might actually have a fun time with this one.

6/10

Review By Matt Compton