Thriller/Horror/Action. Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender, Jack O’Connell, James Burrows, Jumayn Hunter, Finn Atkins, Thomas Gill, Thomas Turgoose. Director: James Watkins.

WITH sensationalist newspaper headlines fanning flames of public concern about youth knife crime, Gordon Brown recently pointed the finger of blame squarely at the family home. “The first responsibility when a child is in trouble or at risk of getting into trouble rests with the parents. We must hold parents responsible,” he declared.

The Prime Minister even suggested that parents of offenders who live in council housing could face eviction. His defiant words fall on deaf ears in Eden Lake, the latest instalment of outbound thrillers which gleefully torture their characters for our so-called amusement.

The timing of James Watkins’ gory film and its provocative themes of teen violence and peer pressure couldn’t be more timely; his execution, though, is decidedly suspect.

A heated debate on problem children and their parents plays, rather pointedly, over the radio as Steve (Fassbender) and his girlfriend Jenny (Reilly) escape London for a romantic weekend in the countryside, where he intends to propose.

They head for a beautiful, secluded lake — in reality, a flooded quarry — which is about to be ruined to make way for a garish development of 50 executive homes.

The couple sunbathe down by the water’s edge but the peace is shattered by 16-year-old bully Brett (O’Connell) and his sniggering posse: Cooper (Turgoose), Harry (Burrows), Mark (Hunter), Paige (Atkins) and Ricky (Gill).

Tensions between the couple and the noisy youths escalate and eventually a fight breaks out resulting in the accidental death of Brett’s snarling Rottweiler, Bonnie.

Steve and Jenny flee into the surrounding woodland and Brett and his posse give chase, determined to exact bloody revenge.

Shot on location in the leafy wilds of Buckinghamshire, Eden Lake begins promisingly, cranking up the tension as relations deteriorate between the lovebirds and the local tearaways.

However, when Steve and Jenny decide to return to the water’s edge for the night, where they clashed with Brett and his group just a few hours earlier, we’re left to wonder if they are determined to put themselves in harm’s way.

Once Steve is strung up with barbed wire and stabbed repeatedly to within an inch of his life, Watkins’ script relinquishes its grasp on reality.

Laughably, every supporting character seems to be a blood relation of Brett’s gang, even the cafe waitress who threatens to kill Steve and Jenny with her icy stare over their full English breakfast.

Reilly and Fassbender develop their screen chemistry gradually in the opening scenes but spend most of the second half of the film apart, the former caked in mud and wailing like a banshee.

The countryside is soon strewn with freshly-spilt blood and charred flesh, and when poor Jenny does eventually escape the forest, she realises to her terrible cost why Eden Lake is advertised as a gated community ....