When a film claims to be based on a graphic novel that doesn’t actually exist (except, perhaps, in the fevered imagination and unpublished work of the director), you might immediately suspect that what you are about to receive is something that you won’t be at all thankful for. And so it is with The Reverend, a film of wildly unfulfilled ambition that eventually seems all the more dreadful because of its own pretensions.

Stuart Brennan stars as the eponymous (and otherwise nameless) Reverend, newly seconded to a small village church, where it becomes clear that all is not well. The neighbouring estate is a crime-ridden hellhole, overseen by local hardman Harold Hicks (Tamer Hassan), who chummily warns the Rev to stay out of his business. But darker forces are at work, as God and Satan have made some sort of bet regarding his soul – the exact nature of this being rather obscured by a combination of accents and terrible sound recording – and our hero is attacked by a sexy female vampire (Marcia Do Vales) in his church. Waking up to a lengthy – seemingly endless – voice-over monologue that expresses the feeling that we should be able to ascertain just by watching, the newly-vampirised Reverend has a lust for blood – and decides to use this to take out the trash, so to speak.

Neil Jones’ film piles on the theological guff, but its ambitions are scuppered from the very start, where Rutger Hauer and Giovanni Lombardo Radice (clearly hired for the day for the sole purpose of getting their names and faces on the poster, given that they are never seen after the pre-credits scene and add absolutely nothing to the main narrative; Doug Bradley pops up for much the same reason, but gets a whole two scenes) have an incoherent, barely audible debate about good and evil. It’s a dreadful start, and things just get worse.

There’s really nothing good here at all. Stuart Brennan has the look of a hapless Seventies sex comedy star and all the visceral emotional intensity of a sloth, as he wanders through the film delivering his empty dialogue with a flatness you’ll struggle to believe anyone could achieve. In his defence though, I imagine most actors would struggle to bring life to this role. I can admire Emily Booth’s relentless determination to carve out a career as a Scream Queen, but dammit, she’s a terrible actress, and here doesn’t even get her tits out as compensation. Only Shane Richie stands out in the cast – not because he’s good, but simply because his clichéd pimp character is so ridiculously unsavoury, and played with such relish, that he briefly brings life to the film is a hilariously histrionic scene with Booth, his hapless hooker. One might think that Richie had the number of this film and simply decided to have fun.

But even this scene is overplayed, dragging on forever – Jones the director needed to tell Jones the editor to get his finger out. Put given that he wrote the damn thing as well, I guess he was too much in love with his own dialogue to cut any of it. And so we get very long scenes of inconsequential waffle when the film dearly needs to get a move on.

And there are the laughable plot incongruities too. The ‘local estate’, when we see it, looks like a large town centre, and we are supposed to accept that not only does the roughest, hardest pub in the area play host to a Goth horror film night (seriously – Goths, horror fans, try this out at your local chav pub and see how it goes) but also that it would be hosted by prostitute Booth, who is roughed up by Richie for wasting ‘cock sucking’ time by talking to the Rev, and yet is apparently allowed a few hours off to watch movies…

Booth’s character is also part of a rather nasty, Daily Mail style prudish moralising in the film. Apparently, the Reverend can tell she’s a whore because of the way she dresses (again – they meet at a Goth night and she’s dressed appropriately, unless Jones is suggesting that showing a bit of cleavage is grounds for someone being labelled a prostitute), and of course she is a victim, not a willing sex worker. Elsewhere, we see a rubber-clad dominatrix who – naturally– mutilates and seemingly murders her clients (because nothing helps repeat business like violent death, and isn’t that what those BDSM freaks are all into anyway?), while the one, entirely gratuitous nude scene is fudged with a very brief long shot of Marcia Do Vales, as if Jones was too embarrassed to show more, despite the fact that her only purpose in the film is as a sex object and the only reason for the scene in question to get some skin on screen.

Ultimately, The Reverend is little more than a collection of misdirected clichés, terrible dialogue, wooden acting and awful music, thrown together and given an unconvincing and thin overcoat of moral philosophy. The unpleasant moral undercurrent and the delusions of grandeur stop the film from even being entertaining in an inadvertently trashy manner, meaning that this is a film that ultimately fails on every level.

DAVID FLINT

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