I would like to encourage the work of the horror-loving film student who made Dead Teenagers but, unfortunately this film written, directed, and produced by Chris LaMartina just isn't very good.

Not surprisingly, the film suffers greatly from the almost complete lack of a budget: it's shot on video with minimal sets, it features a lot of actors who really have no place in front of a camera, and it could use a lot more editing. Trying to put all of the film's many problems aside, though, I'm starting to think that the vision of the script could have worked under better budgetary conditions and with a much more experienced filmmaker. Unfortunately, that sort of what-if potential doesn't make Dead Teenagers any easier to watch.

We start with an anonymous college student (clad in a coat and tie for no apparent reason) perusing the bookshelves at the library. A certain book sort of demands his attention, and he opens it up to find a composition book full of handwritten words and illustrations. Curious about this book that all but threw itself at him, he decides to sit down and read the set of stories it contains. Cue the horror vignettes.

We start with "Boo Men," which is built around a decent albeit hackneyed idea but suffers greatly from an almost complete absence of dialogue and some pacing inconsistencies. Next up is "Full Moonlighting," a werewolf story with a twist that is pretty much done in by some really amateur acting.

Then comes "Skeleton Key," which I find to be the best of the film's four stories. A young woman goes to her dead grandmother's home to look over the remaining possessions before everything is sold. When her boyfriend shows up later in the day, he tries to talk her into spending the night there, despite her reluctance to stay in the house where her aunt was viciously murdered 40 years earlier.

Finally, there's a decent little vampire story that, like "Full Moonlighting," suffers greatly from the quality of the acting (several bad lines of dialogue don't help much, either). At this point, we're taken back to our curious library reader for the ultimate and oh-so-predictable ending of the film.

It seems pretty obvious that Chris LaMartina had to scrounge around whatever and whoever he could find in order to make this movie, which screams "amateur college film." I can certainly appreciate and applaud the college filmmaker's zeal and enthusiasm for trying to stake his own small claim in the horror genre, but Dead Teenagers is far too amateurish to entertain or please any horror fan.

Perhaps LaMartina will go on to make a decent horror film someday, but Dead Teenagers is clearly not that film.