What else but the movies could make the bad guys the heroes? They’re mostly at home in comedies or films with comic elements, because while we know there are guys out there who can crack safes, launch computer viruses or deal drugs, they’d never act against the innocent …would they?

First time writer/director Bryan Bertino goes for nerve sawing tension rather than gore, and thoroughly achieves it through inventive camera angles and an unsettling score and sound effects. Unfortunately logic, natural behaviour and consistency are all sacrificed on the altar to achieve such a living, breathing sense of dread, and cliché often curbs an otherwise realistic depiction of events.

The highlight is the reminiscences of a then-young female photographer who frequented Plato’s and provides the unwitting moral of the story when she describes how she got pubic lice just from sitting down in the mattress-strewn ‘sex room’.