In this feature, Vegan Voorhees examines those jaw-dropping revelations that the slasher film loves to bat our way from the blue, like a pushy parent tossing softballs at a kid who doesn’t want to learn baseball.

This month, the rage-baiting twist ending to oh-aren’t-we-smart teen “horror” Cry_Wolf is pushed into the processor in an effort to find out why it’s so fucking annoying.

As ever, if you’ve not seen it, then beware thy SPOILERS!

Set Up: New-boy at posh prep school falls in with a clique of prank-loving snots who decide to ‘create’ a killer by spreading rumours about a teen-hunting psycho who favours campuses and laughing as their naive schoolmates lap it up. But it looks like somebody has taken the joke too seriously and begins doing in the liars one by one…

Twist: No, they haven’t. It’s all an initiation joke-within-a-joke for new boy, who ends up shooting Jon Bon Jovi dead for a crime he didn’t commit. Unless you count his performance in Ally McBeal.

But, new boy figures out that Queen Bee Lindy Booth (whose character is called ‘Dodger’!?) set it all up in revenge for JBJ not reciprocating her advances and, earlier, had shot dead his shag-piece. She played ’em like a piano.

Problems with this revelation: It’s just shit. It’s not clever. It’s no more inventive than a Murder, She Wrote episode and, worse still, it does this under the guise of being a horror film. A horror film so cram full of horrible, horrible teens that the revelation that none of them are dead is the only thing likely to induce a killing spree.

Who on God’s earth thought that anybody would want these over-privileged, calculating, little fuckers to live through it?

Likely explanation: Stupidity or, possibly, it was written by an ex-prep school brat whose time at said academy is blessed with memories of camaraderie, joyous pranks, and laughing at the have-nots.

An unforgivable insult to a genre it so clearly thinks it’s better than.