We really didn’t need another one of these movies.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. There’s this frumpy, nerdy girl, see, and she’s into witchcraft, and no one in her high school likes her. Everyone picks on her. The only man in the world who’s sweet to her is her English teacher, and naturally she wants to jump his bones but is far too shy to say anything. Instead she uses a bit of the hoodoo in an attempt to work a love spell, which leads us to the awesomely improbable sight of a 20-something public high school English teacher brandishing his own monogrammed hanky. I didn’t know they even made those anymore.

Because this is high school in a movie, all the students are so class-conscious that they hardly discuss anything else. Naturally, then, the popular jocks and accessory girlfriend want to humiliate Tamara. A few unwitting innocents are brought along for the ride, and Tamara winds up dead.

“Manslaughter” doesn’t look good on your high school transcript, so the teenagers decide to bury Tamara in the woods and forget the whole thing ever happened. This is a handy decision; all the principles, even the nice ones, are now guilty by way of complicity. The resurrected Tamara wants to kill her guilty peers. Her guilty peers don’t want to die. We now have our plot.

The rest goes about how you’d expect. Tamara vamps it up while stalking her beloved English teacher and the others, and one by one she picks them off. People die, sometimes messily. There’s (of course) a big party. And it all ends with a climactic cat-and-mouse in the world’s emptiest hospital.

The biggest tragedy is that Tamara is played straight, with very little in the way of laughs or witticisms. Because we’ve seen this story a dozen times already, any little bit of originality helps. But there’s no true wit here, no subversion, not even any particularly inventive uses of gore. The whole exercise is so rote that one has to ask: What’s the point?

The extra features on the DVD are sparse. Director Jeremy Haft and writer Jeffrey Reddick are certainly talkative and mildly entertaining on their commentary track, but the lack of depth in Tamara leads to a lack of depth in analysis. The best we get is the startling revelation that Carrie heavily influenced the story (no, really?) and that the color red isn’t used anywhere until after Tamara comes back to life. Multiple deleted scenes are referenced, but, strangely, are not included on the disc. This is especially strange for a movie that saw limited release and would (in theory) benefit from strong DVD sales.