Director: Steven Lawson 
Writer: Ben Shillito/Steve Lawson/Nick Onsloe/Jonathon Sothcott 
Producers:
Steve Lawson/Billy Murray/Ben Shillito/Jonathon Sothcott  
Starring: Craig Fairbrass/Billy Murray/Dexter Fletcher/Danny Dyer
Year: 2010
Country: UK
BBFC Certification: 18
Duration: 92 minutes

As we have seen with countless television series, movies and books for a few years, it’s safe to say that vampires are the new trend that’s taking over. The only problem with the new vamp trend is that all of the vampires seem loved up, depressing, moody and do-gooders instead of bloodthirsty, angry and crap-your-pants scary. Unfortunately, the last movie I had watched where there were proper bloodthirsty evil vampires was 30 Days of Nights and its sequel (soon to be reviewed) but not a lot of movies today involving vampires are very evil. Dead Cert tries to bring the vampires back to their true form by making them scary and evil and, while they succeed in bringing the idea to life by making the vampires quite violent and laid-back, they’re not effective enough. So the story is about a gang of London gangsters who sell their club, The Inferno, to businessmen. Little did the gangsters know that those businessmen turned out to be vampires wanting their land back after so many years and now, the vampires turn against the gangsters when their part of the deal is not met. So for the next ninety minutes, that is all that happens. There isn’t anything exceptional about this movie except for the fact that they actually made the vampires evil. Dead Cert’s story is unbelievably stretched, as over the course of ninety minutes, all you really saw was what was already described. Basically gangsters selling their club to vampires posing as businessmen and both sides having a fight, there’s nothing more to it, it was just meaningless and had no point.

 
The worst thing about the movie is, without a doubt, the characters with the acting followed closely behind. The characters never stood out whatsoever and you couldn’t care who lived or died because you couldn’t relate to them or care about them. However, I must admit, Billy Murray makes a good evil vampire. Dead Cert is not only host to a bunch of one-dimensional, horribly-written characters but the acting sometimes was quite bad. Billy Murray and Craig Fairbrass both give out a mediocre performance and it was quite funny to see Ciaran Griffiths, best known as Mickey Maguire from Shameless, as an evil vampire but alas, the rest of the cast weren’t very good at portraying their characters and were forgettable. The action scenes were okay but there have been much better and yet again there’s the constant problem of Dead Cert being meaningless as in a couple of scenes, it’s not really clear why the characters start a fight and it’s even more unclear why some characters are trying to kill others. The writing and the direction could have been a little better as there were some parts in the movie that started to drag or weren’t very interesting, such as the first fifteen minutes of the movie and the business meeting scene. Dead Cert certainly has a great idea of the whole ‘gangsters versus vampires’ story but there should have been more time on it as there were a couple of times when it felt too rushed or felt like scenes were jumping from one to the other too quickly without explanation of how the movie got there. The movie should have been a fun little horror movie but instead, it turns into a mess gone horribly wrong.

Overall, I think that while Dead Cert may be kicking the vampires back to touch with their evil selves, the way it was executed was not at all good and definitely could have been better. The vampires may have been evil in the movie but they were, in no way, scary or even realistic. If you’re looking for a good vampire horror movie then I suggest you look elsewhere because this is basically an overstretched story with a couple of gory scenes thrown in for good measure. It’s not good and it’s not something you should buy but it’s below decent enough to rent if you’re curious about it.

About The Author

My name is Darren Camponi and I run a website called Darren Camponi which can be seen here: http://innersanctumreviews.wordpress.com/

2 Responses

  1. Brian

    I was never able to really appreciate Vampires. Even when I was a kid they just didn’t do it for me. They certainly didn’t post Anne Rice and they really, really don’t know post twilight. I actually can’t think of many good vampire films that aren’t close to 70 years old and those aren’t actually scary or anything.

    Reply
  2. Dazz Camponi

    Personally I love vampires. May I suggest you watch 30 Days of Night or The Lost Boys.They’re brilliant vampire horror movies and quite enjoyable.

    Reply

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