So Cloverfield is here. A tantalising viral marketing campaign made JJ Abrams' monster movie one of the hottest tickets of 2008. It promised the destruction of New York, shot on handicam, and starring 'real-looking' unknowns - a King Kong for the YouTube generation. Nice idea. Cloverfield (named, in one of the Byzantine twists of the teaser campaign, after a street near Abrams' office) opened in the States today and had its first British screening last night. As the jerky, handheld footage unscrolled across the screen of the Empire Leicester Square, in front of the kind of audience that gives geekiness a bad name, I was forcibly reminded that Abrams' cultish reputation rests on novel premises - the TV series Alias and Lost - that quickly degenerated into repetitive cliche.

Abrams isn't the writer or director of Cloverfield - those  would be Drew Goddard and Andrew Reeves - but it is very much his ugly baby.

It begins with Hud (TJ Miller) taping testimonials at a farewell party for his friend Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is off to Japan to be vice-president of something-or-other. Rob and his group are clearly rich, influential and twentysomething - if the lofty Central Park apartment is anything to go by - but emotionally, they're teenagers. Rob has slept with his gorgeous friend Beth and then gone all commitment-phobic, a fact Hud childishly blurts out to every single guest in between thwarted, schoolboyish attempts to chat up another partygoer, the exotic Marlena. Suddenly fireballs slam into distant sykyscrapers. Alas, the superannuated brats at the party are not killed, or at least not yet. As they scamper to the street, Hud's camera captures fragmented images of darkness, screaming, rushing feet and then the film’s most potent moments.

The Statue of Liberty's head comes tubling and thumping down the street. A huge, half-seen form shivers the Chrysler Building into fragments. The resulting dustcloud, reminiscent of 9/11, is followed by people toting camera phones, then by looters. A flood of people flees the city via the Brooklyn Bridge - again, reminsicent of the panicked scenes that greeted the New York powercut after 9/11 - and Hud's jostled camera briefly captures a helicopter playing a bewildered spotlight on the decapitated Lady Liberty.

From here, though, it's all downhill into dimness and horribly familiar Hollywood tropes. Rob decides to embark on a frankly lunatic mission uptown - which has become Monster Central - to rescue Beth, apparently not noticing that his brother has just been killed ("my battery died" is his first comment after the fatality, as he petulantly shakes his cellphone). Hud goes along, as does the possibly-Jewish Malena and the dead brother's black girlfriend Lily, forming a unit that ticks most of movieland's ethnic and gender quota boxes.

These kids really do seem remarkably sanguine in the face of all that's happening to them - flirting over open wounds that have been clawed in their chests, climbing up a tower block to get into a neighbouring tower that's leaning drunkenly against it (of course! that's what we'd all do), or trying to freak each other out as they scuttle through subway tunnels. The huge monster that is eating Manhattan has, by the way, shed some rapacious insectoid parasites, the kind of hatchet-faced nasties we've seen in every film from Starship Troopers to Pitch Black. A neat way, this, for the film-makers to get round the fact that the main beast can't pursue our heroes into confined spaces.

The monster itself is only briefly glimpsed until the very end, but this seems more like evasiveness on the part of the film-makers than a coherent attempt to build suspense. Indeed, there's virtually no tension to the film at all, and it never achieves the spooky, Blair Witch style naturalism to which it aspires. A scene in an improvised army field hospital, where everyone is shouting and bleeding and where Marlena explodes (don't ask), Rob tries, passionately and at length, to try and persuade them all to go and look for Beth. A kindly sergeant shows him the door. Anyone else would have shot him. Lots of little things keep distracting you from the supposed 'realism' the handicam footage is supposed to promote: Hud never, ever stops filming, or holding the camera in front of his face; Lily keeps her stilettos on until called upont to climb 36 flights of steps; Beth runs around like an Duracell bunny moments after being impaled on a steel reinforcing strut jutting from a concrete beam.

To be fair, a lot of thought and professionalism has gone into making the cinematography of Cloverfield look amateurish, and to begin with, the whole thing was a great idea. But I was hugely disappointed by the end result. Silly me - I believed the hype.

On another note, look out in April for Paul Andrew Williams's The Cottage - the 34-year-old's follow-up to his assured debut feature London to Brighton, which won him the best newcomer gong in last year's Evening Standard Film Awards. The Cottage, which Williams also wrote is a low-budget horror comedy - a formulation of words known to make film critics weep. To be sure, it is rackety and hugely derivative, but unusually it also contains moments of genuine hilarity and genuine cover-your-face suspense. It reminded me that British film is also about Hammer and the Carry Ons, as well as films like Atonement...