One out of
Five stars
Running time:
83 mins
Lame attempt at a gay Lock, Stock: appalling acting, repulsive set-pieces and a series of desperately unfunny ‘jokes’ make this a strong contender for the worst film of the year.
Director Lab Ky Mo is an Irish director of Chinese descent who appears to have seen Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels way too many times to be considered strictly healthy. If the press notes are to be believed, many of the characters and events depicted in Nine Dead Gay Guys have their origins in real life - the resulting film, however, is a mess.
It’s the kind of movie that is proud to be labelled “politically incorrect” but completely forgets that for that to work, it also has to be funny.
Gay Underworld…
Glenn Mulhern and Brendan Mackey play two Belfast lads who stumble through London’s “gay underworld”, supplementing their giros by offering sexual favours to “UFO’s” (Ugly Fat Oldies, i.e. older gay men), despite the fact that neither of them admit to being gay. When several of their acquaintances turn up dead, the pair find themselves embarked on a highly unamusing caper involving a bed full of money (‘The Bread In The Bed’) and a rather unsavoury initiation ceremony involving two cans of Red Bull.
The acting is so bad that it’s hard to believe the director didn’t just cast his mates. In fact, it comes to something when the best thing you can say about a film is that Michael ‘Robin of Sherwood’ Praed is the only good thing in it - he gives, quite literally, the only decent (or remotely funny) performance in the entire movie.
There’s also a bizarrely garish colour scheme – either deliberate or the result of some terrible processing accident – that makes everyone look yellow, with the result that Steven Berkoff occasionally looks like Homer(sexual) Simpson.
Hugely Unappealing Characters
The main problem is that the characters are so unappealing (for example, ‘Dick Cheese Deepak’, a hard-up taxi driver) and conform to every bad joke stereotype imaginable – so we have jokes about black guys with large penises (Vas Blackwood’s character is named ‘Donkey Dick Dark’), Jewish guys who hoard money (the Bread in the Bed belongs to a character named Golders Green) and a psychotic dwarf with a size complex.
The end result, then, is like an ugly person shouting offensive, unfunny jokes at you in a pub for 83 minutes and as such, is best avoided. Warn your friends.