It is badly photographed and there isn’t any style to make the gratuitous sex and violence and the entirely cliche-ridden teenage characterizations bearable. There are times that Tony Maylam’s direction just looks downright amateurish. And there are times when the proceedings are downright laughable – the reason someone goes into a dark room alone is to get their Vitamin E tablets, or the idea that a strong orderly would be unable to fend off a horribly burned, bedridden alcoholic. Friday the 13th makeup maestro Tom Savini contributes some very gory bloodletting effects, with scenes where one victim has his fingers severed by garden shears and another where five people are massacred in a liferaft being counted among the film’s highlights. The film is also celebrated for the score by Rick Wakeman, although in truth this is not particularly good.

The greatest novetly this shabby, badly made film has is the number of later-famous faces present – including Oscar-winner Holly Hunter, Fisher Stevens and Jason Alexander of Seinfeld (1990-8) fame as the practical jokers of the group. Modern re-releases the film have listed Hunter as the star, even though she has only a very minor role. And of course brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein would later go onto found Miramax Films.

British-born director Tony Maylam went onto make a couple of other genre films – the modernized The Sins of Dorian Gray (tv movie, 1983) and the futuristic monster movie Split Second (1992). His greatest success was probably the adventure film The Riddle of the Sands (1979).