I recently watched Viral, a 2016 American horror film directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, and something immediately bugged me about it. It features a small group of Californian teenagers fearing for their lives when a strange parasitic organism begins to take over people in their town. It took about half of the film for me to twig that this movie was titled Viral but was about parasites. Why the factually incorrect title? I have no idea, but it does seem emblematic of the film in general that it is called Viral and no virus ever arrives. It seems to match how it is a horror film in which nothing really horrific ever happens. It only takes 85 minutes to watch, and it does offer some small, passive amount of entertainment, but I cannot imagine bothering to watch it twice. There are so many outstanding horror films that have come out of America in recent years. Watch one of them twice instead. Or even three times, and skip watching Viral altogether.

Emma (Sofia Black-D’Elia) and Stacey (Lio Tipton) move to a rural Californian town with their science teacher father (Michael Kelly), after their parents separate. Stacey goes from strength to strength, immediately hooking up with local bad boy CJ (Colson Baker, aka rapper Machinegun Kelly). Emma remains troubled by her parents’ marital troubles, but does grow closer to attractive neighbour Evan (Travis Tope).

Locals start contracting what the media describes as ‘worm flu’: actually a parasitic infection by strange intelligent worms that take over a person’s personality and force them to vomit blood onto others. Emma and Stacey’s father gets stuck outside of town, a quarantine is declared, and the sisters spend the remaining running time under threat for a growing zombie-like horde.

I mean, they can’t all be winners. I was quite taken with Joost and Schulman’s debut effort, the ‘is it real, is it fiction’ documentary Catfish (2010), but less so with their Paranormal Activity sequels in 2011 and 2012. Viral is not an entirely wasteful exercise, but there is little avoiding that it simply is not very good. The screenplay by Christopher Landon and Barbara Marshall is not a shade close to the quality of his later work like Happy Death Day, and feels riddled with stereotypes and weak characterisation. Technically the film fails to realise the demands of the plot, and without any solid character work or dialogue there is simply little to attract horror fans than the gore.

The cast is largely comprised with reasonable talent that has little to do. Pretty much everybody has been better in other things than this: Black-D’Elia in Skins and The Night Of, Tipton in Warm Bodies, and even Colson Baker in Roadies.

Almost as perplexing as the title is the production backers: Viral comes from genre goliath Blumhouse Productions, who typically manage much better than this, even on a digital-first release. They have produced some great horror, and some terrible horror. It is rare for them to make such boring horror.