Billy's bloodlust in the Heathway

17 November 2009

A GANGSTER film is being shot in Dagenham in a move that could help resurrect the vampire genre to British screens.

Black and Blue Films are producing the £1million feature Dead Cert, being billed as the first major British vampire film since 1979's Dracula by English director John Badham starring Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing.

Dead Cert brings together Lock, Stock actors Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher as well as Harry Potter prosthetics master Neil Gorton to create a fresh "back-to-basics" vampire film seen "an antidote" to the saccharin romance of US blockbuster Twilight.

Veteran East London actor Billy Murray, 68 - Dracula in the flick - is co-producing Dead Cert set to be released in the UK next year and promoted in Los Angeles last week.

Murray plays an educated, well-spoken Count damned in the 1666 Great Fire of London returning through a gangster pole-dancing club called The Inferno, recreated on set at Heathway Industrial Estate, Manchester Way, Dagenham.

Black and Blue Films founder Jonathan Sothcott hopes Dead Cert could herald a new era for British horror filmmaking dominated by zombie flicks since the Eighties.

Sothcott, 28, said: "There are so many gangster films at the moment, but we haven't made a vampire film in this country for over 30 years."

Director Steven Lawson, 32, an ex-Warren Schol pupil, said: " I think the time of the vampire is back.

"We're trying to combine two genres and do something we've never seen in Britain."

Billy Murray added: "It's different. The parts I've played are all bloodsuckers but it's exiting."

Craig David dancer Lucinda Rhodes, 28, plays pole-dancing queen turned vampire Katy.

She said: "She's very sexy, it makes me feel very nice, being a lady."

Lucinda helps to run the Hornchurch-based Yvonne Rhodes Theatre School catering for young thespians from Dagenham and Havering.

One of the school's young rising stars, Jessie Williams, 10, was picked to front a Hovis TV commercial campaign this June.

Lucinda has also worked with S Club 7 but she felt pole-dancing was somehow more gruelling than commercial moves.

She said: "Commercial dance is good for a workout but training for the film left me with lots of bruises."

The film's five-week shooting schedule, which includes scenes in central London and Wanstead Cemetery, is to wrap up this week at Heathway Industrial Estate, where gangster film Jack Said was filmed in January.