DERANGED

 2012/15/79m

“How well do your know your friends?”

Director: Neil Jones / Writers: Marcia Do Vales & Oscar Carrion / Cast: Marcia Do Vales, Victoria Broom, Natalia Celino, Tabitha Quitman, Pablo Olewsky, Craig Fairbrass.

Body Count: 4

Imagine Jar Jar Binks with a Brazilian accident. Now make him a sexy human female. Give him an axe and some cheeseball dialogue. Roll it in glitter to up the camp. Now you’ve got Deranged.

In this really weird Anglo-Spanish (Spanglo?) production, bride-to-be Gabriella invites three British gal-pals over to Spain for her wild bachelorette shindig. At a house. In the middle of nowhere. With one stripper.

Friends are made up of slutty pharmacy on legs Sylvia, uptight virginal type Mary, and ‘other one’ Anna. Gabriella gets bitten by the resident guard dog, has a seizure and dies. Then someone starts killing the others.

I’m ruining nothing by telling you that Gabriella isn’t dead. After all, that’s her on the DVD cover looking all sinister and blood-spattered, so any mystery is sucked right out of it. She thinks the others all threaten her relationship and wants them gone.

Whether Jones and writer/producer/star Do Vales were trying to make it a dark comedy isn’t clear – Do Vales’ strong Brazilian accent just makes the delivery of lines like “You are [a] fucking c**t!” far more funny than they should be as she sways and lilts around with her axe. She’d make an awesome voice on The Simpsons.

Everything else is sub-par slasher cliches, from missing car keys, to red herrings, and the idiotic decision to go off and have sex amidst all the hoopla. The actors rely on inserting ‘fuck’ into so many sentences that it makes the term redundantly irksome.

Ex-Eastender Craig Fairbrass appears just twice in some tepid ‘is he involved?’ sidebar thing that leads nowhere.

Rarely is a film so accurately titled.