DEAD CERT

by Mark'd Commode

2.5 out of 10

Released: 26th August 2010 (DVD premiere)

Director: Steven Lawson (JUST FOR THE RECORD)

Cast: Craig Fairbrass, Dexter Fletcher, Billy Murray, Lisa McAllister, Perry Benson, Roland Manookian, Ricky Grover, Danny Midwinter, Dave Legeno, Andrew Tiernan, Ian Virgo, Jennifer Matter, Coralie Rose with Danny Dyer, Jason Flemyng and Steven Berkoff

Written by: Steven Lawson & Ben Shilito

Trailer: DEAD CERT

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Long before we had reached Vampire saturation point via the Twilight series and the ever redundant Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Slayer, along came Dead Cert to speed up the boredom.  Now to accuse the reviewer of having no sense of humour would be one thing, but intentional comedy was never on the agenda in this case.  What we have here is a whole boatload of British talent having the cinematic equivalent of a Sunday afternoon football kick about.  They must have all reached in their pockets put in £20 and said OK, lets have a bash at a Vampire movie.  They should have kept this for private screenings for wives and children.  Here’s a brief plot overview if you are still interested.

Dead Cert is an Unforgiven-style ex-London Gangster played by Craig Fairbrass (CLIFFHANGER) who has just opened a new strip club.  Continuously warned by a local nutjob (Steven Berkoff -BEVERLY HILLS COP) that the premises have been built of cursed ground, Dead Cert and his chums, rightly, carry on regardless.  Meanwhile, Dead Cert’s dodgy brother-in-law Eddie (Dexter Fletcher – EVERYWHERE + NOWHERE) has got embroiled with some suspicious looking Romanian gangsters who want to buy the club or gain it through a trumped up illegal boxing bout.  If you are still reading by this point, you’ll have spotted what Dead Cert and his muppets haven’t and its that the Romanians are in fact a coven of ancient vampires (ed. aren’t covens exclusive to witches?) led by The Wolf (Billy Murray – ESSEX BOYS).  Now usually a reviewer would stop here as not to ruin the plot or give away any spoilers. I’m stopping because I really truly can’t bear to recall anymore of it. So here follows a list of reasons Dead Cert is a further nail in Dracula’s coffin.

Dead Cert has one of the worst scripts ever given to jobbing actors in the history of British horror. Please prove me wrong.  How the actors kept a straight face whenever poor old Steven Berkoff’s harbinger of doom turns up is probably in the extras. The likes of Perry Benson (THIS IS ENGLAND) and Ricky Grover (BIG FAT GYPSY GANGSTER) prove why they are only given small roles elsewhere, with some displays of truly awful acting.  The strip club is always empty and resembles no club on Earth I’ve ever seen. It looks like it was filmed in a school gym.  As for the vampires, the reason for watching this sh*t, they are insipid and unsexy. Billy Murray makes for a terrible lead vampire.  He sleepwalks through proceedings barely summoning up enough energy to bare his fangs. Jason Flemyng (HANNA) pops up and he has the most useless cameo of all time as an early victim.  The worst of the pongy acting is down to his best mate, Dexter Fletcher who has been impressing us with his directorial debut Wild Bill recently.  He’s the least convincing gangster to show up since the last time he played one, some people just can’t do hard.  Especially with a hairstyle like the one he’s sporting here – Fraggle Rock 2 anyone? Unsurprisingly the most frequent word in the script is c88t, it’s used so much it made me miss the F word. All this could have been salvageable if the action or even make up effects were any good, but I’ve seen scarier vampire costumes on a clothes peg in Pound Land, and the action is mostly shot from far away or in log takes, which make it look slow, ponderous and most of all, staged. Worst of all is that this feels like a missed opportunity, such a good cast with a real chance at making a scary British horror flick, squandered.  Made me wish Danny Dyer (THE FOOTBALL FACTORY) was in it… Oh wait he was. Fans of the Bexley Heath wonder have to wait right until the end for his Sean Connery-style Robin Hood – Prince Of Thieves – style cameo. Too little, too late. Oh well, wonder who was in goal?

Look out for my review of: Devil’s Playground another Craig Fairbrass actioner in the style of 28 Days Later.

2.5 out of 10 – Dead Fart more like. Avoid like garlic.

SEE THE COMMENTS FOR JOE PESCI II’s witty counter-review… It may even make you watch it!!!>??? Oh-Oh!

WHAT HAVE I SEEN THAT PERSON IN?

One thought on “DEAD CERT”

  1. HERE IS JOE PESCI II’s witty counter-review… It’s so funny you may make the mistake of watching the film!!!

    This dismal abomination is ‘A Steve Lawson Film’. Steve Lawson should hang his head in eternal shame. Think not of all the great moments in cinema for Dead Cert besmirches them all. This vile excrescence should be kicked screaming (no, it’s not a film which screams, it mutters and mumbles) into the gutter of movie oblivion from whence it must never be rescued. We could destroy it, but then everyone would think it was a lost classic. No, let us keep it on our shelves so that when challenged we can produce it and say ‘yea, verily, ‘tis a film which suggests that cinema is putrid, exhausted of ideas and verve, lacking sense, excitement, magic, beauty, brutality, love, comedy, pain; this film is a sickness, which must forever be kept from our screens lest it infect us with its dispiriting, deluded, downright badness.’

    Did Steve Lawson have a compelling story to tell? No. Did he have an exciting visual language? No. Perhaps he wanted to give us some gratuitous violence and strippers? No, well there’s a lot of violence, but it’s all a bit cack-handed. Perhaps he wanted to present us with a cerebral or aesthetic meditation on mortality, evil, and the urge to survive? No.

    What in blue blazes has he given us then?

    The plot: a gangster loses his extraordinarily chaste strip club to some vampires (who use it as base of operations for either (a) world domination or (b) opening more strip clubs) after he dimly bets his teddy-bear of a brother-in-law can beat up a giant cannibal killing machine. He decides to get it back.

    It’s as if the cast of Eastenders (or possibly some Eastenders cast-offs) were sitting around when one of them (Billy Murray?) said ‘Let’s make a vampire movie during the lunch break!’ and the others said ‘do we have to?’ and Billy said ‘yes, for I am really a Romanian vampire and I will drain your blood if you do not submit to my will’ and the others tutted, shrugged their shoulders and said ‘right, let’s get it over and done with.’ If you believe that to be unlikely, it is as nothing compared to Dead Cert’s improbable unfolding of events, matched only by the sheer tedium instilled by the cardboard cut-out, woodenly acted characters. I’ve rarely seen actors display such little involvement. I swear Craig Fairbrass is asleep half the time, lucky git. He and his goons treat everything as just another day at the office, even though this is the day they go to war with some VAMPIRES. And it’s not cool ‘let’s kill these vampires’ stoicism we’re looking at, it’s ‘another druggie’s died in the toilets’ dreariness. Roland Manookian is the pick of a bad bunch as he seems to be having a good time, but the rest of them merge into a miserable melange of mockney moroseness, Dexter Fletcher beingparticularly bad, not helped by a hairstyle reminiscent of Zelda from Terrahawks.

    But the Wolf is never far away, as Steven Berkoff’s astonishing performance makes clear. At least he looks like he’s doing some acting. Terrible acting perhaps, but he’s giving the film the performance it deserves. He plays the apparent religious maniac who turns out to be one of the few sane and sensible people in the cast (the other being the girl who saves the day at the end but the film is so inept no-one ever says her name). Alas, Berkoff’s performance is big, a histrionic no-holds-barred scenery-munching show of ham-type proportions. This is set into stark relief by the rest of the cast mumbling, shuffling and sleepwalking around him, so the effect is something like this ‘THEY ARE VAMPIRES I TELL YOU!!!!’ ‘Yeah right whatever’ ‘AND THEY THIRST, THIRST FOR OUR VERY BLOOOOOOD!’ ‘Woss goin’ on?’ ‘IT IS THE HOWLING TIME OF THE WOOOOOLF!!!!!’ ‘Fink I’ll watch X Factor tonight’. And so Berkoff sticks out like the proverbial, when he is actually the only one who is giving the film the OTT that it might have benefitted from. True, I’m forgetting the vampire who pronounces his W’s as V’s and vice versa (or wice wersa), but Steve Lawson forgets about him too. Instead we have Murray and Fletcher as two of the dullest villains I’ve seen in a long time (and I watched Bonded by Blood recently). You know a film’s in trouble when the highlight is Steven Berkoff’s wig for some 1980s flashbacks.

    Elsewhere Lisa McAllister continues to convince me that she’s not an actress, and Fairbrass turns in a monolithically monosyllabic performance with such wooden, incomprehensible solidity that you wonder if he actually is one of Tolkien’s Ents made flesh.

    Vampire lore is modified, which is fair enough, that’s a storyteller’s prerogative: to take the best bits of a tradition and to add to it. These vampires can operate in daylight (though I suspect this was more because they couldn’t afford a night-shoot). That you only ‘turn’ after death is a good touch which should have provided the film with an emotional punch. (It doesn’t.) However, I draw the line at vampires being hurt by flowers (specific ones, not any passing daisy), a revelation which had our heroes nodding as if they’d suspected it all along (right from the moment about five minutes in when someone notices there are petals in the water-tank perhaps).

    As noted by greater authorities than me, horror films often contain metaphors for other fears. Here it is foreigners, and it’s not all that metaphorical. Even before they turn out to be vampires, our racist heroes hate the Romanians for being Romanian. That the villainous immigrants are defeated by being forcibly washed pretty much proves it. But, more importantly, what are we to make of Murray’s extraordinary grey make-up? Did no-one notice? Didn’t Steve Lawson think ‘that doesn’t work’? And what idiot thought Perry Benson would be good as some sort of henchman? (He does get one good line though I’ve forgotten it and I’m not going back to find it). And whatever happened to dramatic irony? Our heroes, before the ‘exciting’ climactic fight, take succour in the things that mean most to them (faith functioning as protection is another potentially good touch). Having set this up, the film then forgets about it: one of them has chosen his faith in his family. We have already seen his wife slaughtered. Surely her new vampire self should kill him? That’s the rules. But no, he just sort of, gets killed. Surely Steve Lawson didn’t reject this notion as being too hackneyed? After all, the rest of this sorry mess is hackneyed to buggery.

    It’s just such an arid, earnest film, yet the stakes are low (pun intended – sorry), yet curiously there is a surprisingly plentiful supply of wooden stakes in the club, which puzzles me a bit.

    Finally, a few comments for any film-makers out there about twist endings: they only work if (a) we don’t see them coming, (b) they make sense of the film, (c) they don’t undermine everything we’ve seen. Bringing a villain back after he’s been marmalised isn’t spooky or clever, it just means you haven’t finished the film. Nice seeing Danny Dyer in glasses though.

    1 out of 10

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