THE SEVEN

CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS ETC

Yet another entry in the seemingly endless horror subgenre of Stupid People Do Stupid Things For Stupid Reasons, this combines its intergalactic stupidity by featuring Particularly Stupid People Doing Really Stupid Things For Staggeringly Stupid Reasons, topped with an even more stupid conclusion and a weapons grade stupid shock coda. This much stupid in one place would be thought excessive in a cauliflower.

The Stupids in this instance are a gathering of high school dimwits (there are seven of them, hence the title) who break into school after hours because one of them wants to shag his girlfriend and the others are there to make sure everything's okay. But they get locked in by the caretaker (nicknamed Squeaky because of the wheels on his cleaning trolley) and are faced with spending the weekend in there - until they start getting bumped off by the ghosts of a Satanic cult, led by Dean Cain of all people, who all died when the old mansion burned down and the school was later built on the site...

It's impossible to care whether any of these dullards survive and there isn't even any fun to be had watching them being offed. Even if you could rustle up some unearned empathy for them, it's all undone by a third-act Groundhog Day have-another-go plot twist that undoes absolutely everything the film had thought it had done up to that point, which means the final It's-Not-Over obligatory last shot makes no sense. The very, very best you can say about The Seven in its defence is that one of the girls is kind of cute and it's only eighty minutes long, and neither of those should be anywhere near enough reason to watch the damned thing. Thoroughly useless.

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