What's not to love about Mandy Lane (Amber Heard)? She's pretty. She's blonde. She's sweet. She's got the perfect life. Well, except for being followed around by that needy guy who was once her confidant. And not quite feeling the connection with her new friends, although that should be sorted by spending a weekend with them.

But not long after Mandy and the school's in-crowd reach their breakaway spot, an isolated farmhouse straight out of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre', weird stuff starts happening. Their drinking games are interrupted by power failures. Make-out sessions are disturbed by distant gun shots. Was that door always open? And where the hell has Jake disappeared to?

A horror in the 'Friday the 13th' tradition, 'All The Boys Love Mandy Lane' nonetheless manages to avoid the pitfalls of most teen slasher flicks. With a grainy, low-budget feel replacing the slick, stylised Hollywood approach the inevitable deaths are disturbingly visceral rather than safely sanitised.

As the body count mounts and the suspect list shortens, the tension grows exponentially to such a level that the less than surprising twist ending can be forgiven. Like that other grimy cult favourite, 'My Little Eye', this direct-to-DVD release reveals there's still a faint pulse in a genre that's been bled to inches of its death.