Comedy and horror - two themes that can, and often do work well together. Unfortunately, in this case, the outcome is dire. Despite the spate of fantastic American teen slasher movies in recent years, there have evidently been a few duff candidates slipping through the net. This is most certainly one of them.

The start is promising, however. It's forty years ago, there's a tongue-in-cheek soundtrack and a biker girl called Christine bursts into a convent with a bottle of liquor in one hand and a humdinger of a shotgun in the other. She proceeds to shoot down the priest and all the nuns. Things should bode well after this ludicrously extreme, but cool, opening sequence. Fast-forward to present day, and expectations begin to plummet at a serious pace.

There is the predictable and formulaic group of teens - the geek, the Goth, the bimbo cheerleader, the sensible one and a couple of frat boys. Such a line-up can work spectacularly, but this bunch doesn't have either the presence or the energy to make it spontaneous. A God-awful script doesn't help, it's true, as inevitably these kids will want to indulge a little doobie inhalation, with some hows-your-father, in a haunted convent when we would rather spend an evening with Freddy Krueger.

The plot flaws fly in thick and fast. Christine is remarkably feisty and street-sassy for someone who is meant to be a recluse since the shooting. The possessed nuns are remarkably easy to kill when the time comes, so why has it taken so long to do it? And where do these devil-spawned zombies come from in the first place?

The tackiness of the film could possibly have made it a cult. Instead this reviewer was left flummoxed, dissatisfied and wishing someone had screamed, "Don't!", before going in.