THE DEAD CENTER / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: BILLY SENESE / STARRING: SHANE CARRUTH, POORNA JAGANNATHAN, JEREMY CHILDS, BILL FEEHELY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
When an extremely dead suicide victim escapes his body bag and wakes up in a psych ward, everybody in the hospital is about to have a very bad day.
The chief recipients of that bad day are the well-meaning loose-cannon psychiatrist who admits ‘John Doe’ onto the ward without permission (seemingly oblivious to the fact that this bug eyed catatonic has ‘very bad news’ written all over him) and a burger-munching coroner who’s going above-and-beyond to find out how the corpse of a dead man could so inexplicably go walkabout, and where he’s gone walkabout to. Luckily for the flimsy narrative (but unluckily for the audience), their paths don’t cross until very late in the story, which means neither man asks any of the obvious questions that could bring this mess to a hasty conclusion. Instead, there’s a lot of derivative nonsense that includes a recurring spiral motif, an ancient pre-Christian evil called the ‘mouth of death’, and heard-it-all-before guff alluding to our psychiatrist hero’s troubled past with a touch of ‘how overworked and underfunded the mental health care system is’ thrown in for good measure (don’t you just love a horror movie with a social conscience?) Even when John Doe mysteriously starts talking (and pleading with the psychiatrist to kill him) and people in the hospital start dying from what looks like a very nasty case of ballpoint pen around the mouth, our kindly protagonist still doesn’t engage brain long enough to realise his creepy new patient might have something to do with it. Throw in some un-jumpy jump scares, occasional shaky cam-o-vision, and a hospital with the worst security procedures in the history of psychiatric medicine (has no-one in this place heard of shutting doors properly?) and you’ve got an un-horrifying horror that staggers towards an incomprehensible yet completely predictable conclusion and leaves us with the vague threat that a part two could potentially be on the horizon. The possibility of a Dead Center Part Deux is definitely something that could keep me awake at nights.
Apparently, Dead Center’s writer-director Billy Senese has recently been hailed as a ‘masterful new voice in terror’ and the overload of special features that accompany this dire waste of 93 minutes certainly suggests the distributor believes that too. There are two commentaries, deleted scenes, and a selection of Senese’s short films and radio plays. There’s also an in-depth making-of documentary, during which Senese and his crew revisit the film’s locations and talk about the production in terms that suggest they’ve created some kind of horror redefining masterpiece. While it’s good to be confident about your product (and getting any movie in front of cameras and onto home distribution is always a massive achievement), all the self-congratulation and “hey ma, see how we tapped into the zeitgeist” back-slapping gets a bit wearing after the first few minutes. If Senese is a masterful new voice in terror, the terror industry is in very bad shape indeed.
Maybe you’ll like it or maybe this reviewer’s right and The Dead Center is nothing but very tatty Emperor’s new clothes. All I’ll say is that I’m not going to watch it again to find out.
