This medical student horror ultimately squanders a good first act on supernatural slasher cliche.  But, it's a passable chiller with a likeable cast of Brit faces (this is an Ireland passing for America movie in the style of WAZ), led by an up and coming American actress - here The Uninvited and The Grudge 2's Arielle Kebbel.

Beginning as a dark "what would you do" thriller, Red Mist (aka Freakdog) ignores the tasty potential for paranoia and destruction that threatens to beset the gang of med students when the sympathetic chipmunk-cheeked Kebbel threatens to tell all.

Plumping for paranormal panic, debuting writer Spence Wright and Shrooms director Breathnach draw deep from the original Japanese Grudge movie Ju-on and similarly themed 70s Aussie shocker Patrick for a slasher that delivers the goods within its modest ambition.

Breathnach seems to be trying to shrink his carbon footprint by seemingly not lighting any interior scene (guys, if we can't see anything why not just work in radio?), but brings the nastier elements in Wright's script vividly to life - acid forcefeeding and self-mutilation, and in Potts' janitor a character who gets off on self-harming while gazing at dead women.

Potts, of TV's Primeval, is a twitchy, unnerving punching bag, and a good supporting cast make Red Mist smell fresher than it ought, including Martin Compston, who blazed onto screens in Sweet Sixteen, and is memorably odious here as a mercenary med student.

Acceptable late night TV fodder, but no heart-stopper.

Rob Daniel