Stitches sees Ross Noble join that long line of stand-up comedians, from Morecambe and Wise to Cannon and Ball, who – either through personal vanity or the misguided belief of film producers – find themselves starring in movies, despite not being actors. It's not always a recipe for disaster, but unfortunately, this film makes The Boys in Blue look like the height of sophisticated humour. As funny as AIDS, Stitches joins Kill Keith in that exclusive list of recent British (British/Irish in this case) comedy horror films that will make you want to drive a steel spike into your brain just to get some relief from the relentless string of unfunny jokes and awful characters played by rotten actors.

Horror comedy is, of course, a difficult thing to get right – the balance between the two connected by very different genres is a tricky one. No one even tries here. Instead, after an introduction with Noble as predictably foul-mouthed, bitter clown Stitches who dies in a birthday party accident, we get around 50 minutes of the worst teen comedy imaginable, mostly taking place at a party and filled with the sort of charmless characters that British TV viewers will be only too familiar with. This goes on and on and on. And on. Eventually, someone remembers that this is supposedly a horror film, and the resurrected Stitches turns up to take his bloody revenge on the kids who were not responsible for his death, while cracking one-liners that I assume writer/director Conor McMahon thought would have people rolling in the aisles.

Noble has such a one-dimensional part here – it's just looking sinister and muttering puns in a raspy voice – that I can't really criticise his performance... because there's little performance involved. The rest of the teenage cast are uniformly dreadful though. The best you can say about them is that they play a group of self-centered, charmless, obnoxious tossers with consummate ease.

The only thing that Stitches has going for it are the practical gore effects, which are bloody, splattery and gross. But it takes more than an exploding head, a disembowelling and a brain-scooping to make a film work. Everything else here is just awful.

Watching Stitches was, quite honestly, painful. Don't put yourself through the same ordeal.

DAVID FLINT

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