From the Dark

 This one's an Irish movie about a vampire who's freed from being pickled in peat by a guy with a shovel (I think this might be the first time I see peat mining depicted in a movie.)

 A squabbling young couple (Niamh Algar and Stephen Cromwell) has their car break down within the creature's haunts, and must survive the vampire's attacks by using light, which keeps the children of the night away. Writer/Director Conor McMahon and co-writer Demian Fox have some problems with plausibility and consistency (the vampire seems perfectly able to smash  out headlights, but is unable to blow out a candle) but overall it's a neat, focused little vampire siege movie. Low budget to a fault and a little one-note, but it's well-crafted and has tons of shots of the vampire moving around unseen in the background, if that type of thing works for you.

Sea Fever

 From A Dark Song to Oddity, the Irish have neatly bookended the last decade with some of my favorite low-budget horror films. 2019's Sea Fever... doesn't rank anywhere as high, and to be brutally honest I doubt I'll remember much of it in a couple of months. But it's a solid, well-crafted bit of modern nautical horror.

 Siobhan (Hermione Corfield) is a socially awkward marine biology student who books a slot on a fishing trawler to work on her PhD. The ship (the Niamh Cinn Óir, named after a little-known member of the mythical Tuatha De Danaan clan) is fairly small, and its crew of six immediately balks at taking on a red-haired passenger, as it's a sure sign of bad luck. Siobhan balks in turn at their superstition... but guess what? They're all in a horror movie. Superstition turns out to be correct, much like that excellent 'curse' gag in Master and Commander.

 In this case, bad luck means that when the boat ventures into an 'exclusion zone' chasing after a large shoal of fish, it's captured by something that starts causing several spots in the wooden hull to rot away, awash in a weird blue slime. When Siobhan gets in her diving gear and goes out to see what's causing it, she finds a beautiful giant creature that looks like an upside down bioluminescent jellyfish, with its tentacles latched onto the hull.

 The crew manage to get free of the creature's clutches, but soon they find that it's left a virus-like contagion in the ship. And then people start dying.

 It's... all right. I didn't feel the script, which starts out very promising, goes anywhere particularly interesting - the middle section, especially, feels very aimless and unstructured. The characters are relatively well drawn, but once they find that they're trapped in the ship they unravel in ways overtly familiar from a hundred movies like this. The same is true of the situations the crew must work their way through- It's all oddly perfunctory, a little too familiar, and the science is pretty iffy. The bones of a good science thriller are there, but the flesh is all second-hand and not assembled very well, and it lacks the spark that would bring it to life.

 Speaking of flesh: there's quite a decent amount of gore, thanks to the messy way the infection makes an egress out of its human hosts. Nothing too extravagant, but it's solid and it results in a hanful of decent horror moments. The atmosphere is well developed, too; I'm not a fan of Neasa Hardiman's script, but her direction is fairly impressive, especially given the budget she's working with.
 At this point I could stretch my already tortured Frankenstein's monster metaphor and say something like the skin of the creature is well stitched together and the makeup gives it at least a semblance of life. But, dear reader, know that I respect your time too much for such shenanigans. I would never dream of wasting precious minutes of your life with even a single sentence of such pointless drivel, not even were I to deliver it in pointlessly convoluted, flowery prose.

 Right. Where were we? Oh, yeah: the actors are all decent - the cast is rounded out by Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott as the captain and her second-in-command, plus Olwen Fouéré, Jack Hickey, Ardalan Esmaili and Elie Bouakaze. They're a decent bunch to spend ninety minutes with, even if the script doesn't have a lot of time for them.

 For good or for ill, this one didn't leave much of an impression, but that's probably just me.

Fréwaka

 When Shoo (Clare Monnelly) and her fiancée Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya) arrive at Shoo's mother's home to clean up after her death, Mila is shocked at just how few fractions of a fuck she seems to give. Things aren't improved when Shoo decides to take a care worker gig somewhere out in the boondocks and fucks right off, leaving poor Mila to throw away all her late, unknown mother-in-law's belongings. That's no way to foster a relationship.

 Shoo of course has her reasons, which are explained later in the film. But the bulk of the story concerns her stint taking care of Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), an older woman living alone in an isolated, large house after a stroke.

 Peig, you see, is a difficult customer - she refuses to open the door for Shoo, and greets her with a puddle of piss. (that's piss!, Peig helpfully explains.) Even once Shoo gets access to the house, she has to deal with Peig's constant hostility and bizarre rituals - from throwing away all her pills and dumping a ton of salt in her porridge, to keeping all the mirrors in the house covered and making Shoo tap an iron horseshoe three times every time she wants to come in from outside.

 But as Shoo ingratiates herself to the older woman, she starts to think there may be more to her weirdness than paranoid delusions. No points for guessing that there is, indeed, a supernatural menace trying to wend its way into the house from without (and within, through the heavily warded cellar door).

 Fréwaka does what it does well. Writer/director Aislinn Clarke and her crew do wonders with a shoestring budget - I have to respect a movie that has 'monsters' that include guys in suits and Friday-the-13th-part-one-style sack-cloth masks... and succeeds in making them menacing without any violence. The filmmaking is often beautiful, with some pretty striking use of colour, and always atmospheric (cinematographer: Narayan Van Maele); A jarring soundtrack by Die Hexen helps immensely.

 This is what people call an extreme slow-burn, and the tone is unremittingly bleak, with some bursts of warmth as the relationship between the protagonists develops - both actresses are excellent.

 The story flows well, has suitably nasty reveals. Its plot, much like Clarke's previous (and better, in my opinion) movie The Devil's Doorway, hinges between Irish Catholic abuse and more pagan concerns, and it incorporates a lot of cultural and supernatural specifics, along with some cool ideas. My  favorite being that certain thresholds like marriage, birth and death acting as vectors through which the uncanny can seep in... Shoo, unfortunately, qualifies for all three). This is all good stuff.

 Despite  fulfilling several criteria, I don't think this can be accused of being elevated horror - It's certainly arthouse and built around trauma, but there's never a sense that it's only begrudgingly a horror movie. However well crafted and sincere, though, I constantly felt a certain familiarity to the film's tropes and throughline, and a distance I wasn't able to close.

 These are both things I've struggled with a handful of other modern folk horror movies, though... So maybe mine is a a problem with the subgenre? I'd hope not - I love folklore, I love horror, and I love movies that try to make faeries as scary as they were to our distant ancestors. So I'm left a bit annoyed I didn't like this movie as much as I wanted to.

Fatal Deviation

 After watching both the Aussies and the Germans do their country proud with their martial arts skills, I started looking out for other martial arts films from unexpected countries. This is how I came to hear of Fatal Deviation, Ireland's first full-length martial arts picture. It was also dubbed one of the worst movies ever made by a bunch of humourless twits who obviously don't watch enough movies.

 It stars martial artist James Bennett as... Jimmy Bennett, a martial artist who returns home to his hometown, refurbishes his father's house, meets Nicola (Nicola O'Sullivan), a nice local girl who works at the local supermarket, gets in a feud with the mob boss Mike (Michael Regan - are you noticing a pattern here?) that killed his father (whose son is dating Nicola, of course), and enters a secret, violent kumite-like tournament run by Christian monks which the mobsters are desperate to win as it will somehow determine the fate of the whole town. You know, just a day in the life in rural Ireland.

#Gandalfismysifu

 It's barely coherent, no one involved had any idea how to make an action movie, and it was made for next to no money. It's objectively bad. Also... kind of a lot of fun and very charming.

 Like many of these pseudo-vanity projects, the whole thing is essentially the star's audition tape to get better parts in action movies; Bennett gathered a group of his mates and just shot scenes wherever people would let him (as you can imagine, this doesn't do wonders for the film's continuity). The main financier for the film (Regan) put money down with the condition he was given a juicy part. It should be a disaster. And it kind of is, to be honest: The acting is terrible*, the filmmaking is all ugly 90's home video, with frequent A/V glitches and poorly lit scenes. The music... oh god, the music is particularly atrocious mix of horrid 'inspirational' pop and Casiotone incidental music.

 But! It's never boring, and there's so much enthusiasm put into the production that it's really hard to harbour it any ill will.
 It's full of padding, but most of it is of the so-bizarre-it's-entertaining variety; Where other movies would have endless scenes of people walking around and pointless conversations (and to be clear, there is a bit of that here), the filler in Fatal Deviation tends toward the inspired. Why settle for a boring-ass mundane shit when you can have a man carefully setting up and then taking a bath in an outdoor bathtub with an open fire under it? Or Irish catholic kung-fu Gandalf (Johnny Murray) training Jimmy by waving flaming sticks at the camera? Or a musical montage where our hero remembers having tender sex with his girl, intercut with random, mundane interactions with the mobsters and shots of our protagonist nodding thoughtfully? Or a picnic where our lovebirds lie among a scattering of oranges all over the picnic blanket?

 The action is not great - Bennett and a few of the other combatants do have some moves, but the choreographies are simple and making the fights look good is beyond the abilities of anyone involved, at least back when this got made; One of the weakest parts of the movie, the tournament, is actually the most action-packed. There are a couple of shootouts as well (including one where Bennett stands on his motorbike that reminded me of Top Secret!) that might as well have been filmed as a fingergun battles. Having said all that: there's a fairly cool car crash, and the modest stunts on display are still pretty impressive for a bunch of friends and acquaintances working out how to put a movie together as they go along. They do the Jackie-Chan-style bloopers reel at the end, and it gives you a pretty good idea how much harder doing this is than it looks - especially when there's no one around who knows how to handle stunts; A seemingly simple four-foot fall seems to have been pretty painful for the actor involved.

 It'd be beyond wrong-headed not to grade this in a curve- and even if you don't, worst film ever my arse. At the very least Bennett and co. clearly understand and love the type of film they want to make, and they bring their own spin to it. You know that trope of the action guy stopping a violent robbery at a drugstore? Here the hero kicks the asses of two unconvincing random stoned chuckleheads making a nuisance of themselves at a fucking Londis.

 OK, it's not a good spin, but it's unique and hugely entertaining.

 Even if you are immune to its charms, I'd say this is the rarely achieved so-bad-it's-good (as opposed to way more common mediocre or cynical) and it's full of memorable, hilarious moments. If the batshit insane epilogue doesn't fill you with joy, I just don't know what to tell you.

 *: On a completely unrelated note, I should also mention that this is the film debut Mikey Graham (as Mike Graham, of course) of "Rock Band" Boyzone. I have no idea why I was reminded of this fact just now.

Gateway

 Mike (Tim Creed) is part of a petty gang of criminals - pot dealers who squat in abandoned houses to grow their produce. He's haunted by the memory of a mysterious woman (Fiona Hardy) as the film accompanies him during a day out running deals, talking to an enforcer and various people higher up in the underworld pecking order, and getting a lead on a house they may be able to use to grow their next batch of weed.

 And the house seems well suited for their ends - until, while scoping it out, they discover a locked room. As soon as its door is opened, bad things start happening.

 Gateway is full of lurid details; Even while it's mostly about low-level criminals going around their day-to-day business and setting up their next job, it manages to cram in a torture victim and a few colourful characters. Later there are various deaths, a very bizarre (and un-sexy) sex scene, plus a few mysteries to unravel.

 But all of it is handled in the most unsensational way possible. The film is, I think, first and foremost an exercise in rigidly controlled tone. Stark characters, their stoic expressions frequently breaking into open grief, are framed against starker skies. There's no music, just silence - or else a carefully deployed atonal drone or sedate electronic cacophony (the sound design is excellent). The dialog, whether it's dealing with the realities of drug dealing or venting interpersonal grudges, is sparse, clipped, elliptical, as are the editing schemes for many of the scenes. The camera work is elegant, alternating between static shots and purposeful, precise movement where needed. The supernatural mystery at the heart of the movie makes little sense and has no interest in explaining itself, an enigma wrapped in an unassuming surrealist shroud. (This, I should probably clarify, is a good thing).

 This is a willfully impenetrable film, a slow-burn that remains obstinately sedate and oblique even when things pick up and the bodies start piling up at an admirable pace in the back half. Writer/director Niall Owens and cinematographer Ger Murphy carefully build atmosphere until it's almost asphyxiating; It's a low-budget marvel that's low on horror and high on dread.
 I rather like it, but it's a bastard hard film to recommend.

A Dark Song

 The Abramelin ritual is a taxing, months-long set of occult processes performed with the aim to purify yourself enough to contact and ask a boon of your Daemon - or, in more traditional, theurgic versions of the ritual, your holy guardian angel. It's probably best known for being a ritual Aleister Crowley bailed out of; he was reportedly never the same again afterwards.

 This ritual is at the center of A Dark Song's story - and that, in and of itself, is pretty pretty impressive! But even better, the whole of the film makes an effort to portray occult practices in a somewhat realistic light*. Realistic being a relative term here, of course**, but I'm heavily predisposed to like a movie that mentions Gnosticism and then calls its main character Sophia.

 Sophia (Catherine Walker) hires a house out in the Welsh countryside to perform the ritual (which can take anywhere from six months to a year and a half, and can't be safely interrupted once started) and the services of Solomon (Steve Oram), a Brit occultist for hire, to guide her through the process. He gets almost one hundred thousand euros, plus the chance to also ask a boon of the daemon at the end of the rite. She says she does it to talk with her dead infant son; The truth is, of course, a little more complicated.

 The meat of the movie revolves around a complex set of evolving rituals as Sophia migrates between the different circles scored on the living room floor in a slow trawl towards purification - all the while enduring both ritual-mandated deprivation and abuse from her chosen guru, who may be as much of a danger as the occult forces they're playing with.

 An occult psychological horror chamber piece, then - how's that for a subgenre label?

 Writer/director Liam Gavin, production designer Conor Dennison, set decorator Ciara O'Donovan and cinematographer Cathal Watters carefully mark out the progress of the ritual by making the magic(k)al diagrams on the living room floor ever more intricate and messier. There's a little bit of blood and a few special effects later on as the ritual kicks in and unmoors either the house from reality or poor Sophia from her senses, but the film is carefully calibrated to work well within its small-ish indie budget. A wonderfully effective scare is achieved with just shadows, a cigarette ember, and great sound design; It's a beautifully crafted movie.

 You may find the film's slow-burn approach a bit, well, slow if you're not interested in the procedural detail of hermetic magic, but the central relationship is intense, dramatic and well-drawn enough that I think the film should still work. Both actors are excellent, and I found Sophia's arc very moving. Outstanding.

 

*: The only other movie I can think of that pays this much attention to the nerdier aspects of the occult is The Alchemist's Cookbook, also from 2016; The stars were obviously right that year.

**: For obvious reasons. Also, I'm sure it's not an entirely accurate portrayal of the workings involved, not with Reiki symbols making an appearance... though that sounds to me like exactly the sort of syncretic practices occultists do all the time. In any case, I don't know enough about it for it to bother me.

The Cellar

 I really enjoyed The Pilgrimage, a historical VOD action movie where Jon Bernthal gets medieval while protecting a few monks and a relic of (perceived) mass destruction. So of course I'm going to watch a movie from the same writer/director (Brendan Muldowney) about, going by the trailer, a haunted house with demonic equations, alchemy and a passage to some sort of Sheol.

 The good news is that Muldowney remains pretty good behind the cameras, and cinematographer Tom Comerford returns as well: it's a nicely atmospheric movie, with some beautiful panoramic shots of the Irish countryside and some well-constructed (if generic) genre moments.

 The bad news is that it's kind of a mess, and not the fun kind of mess.

 Keira Woods (Elisha Cuthbert) has just moved to a huge new house with her husband (Eoin Macken) and her two children: a nasty, deeply unlikeable teen (Abby Fitz), and a weirdo tween (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady). The elder Woods-es run an ad agency using influencers or something, and if there's a combination of words that would make me lose sympathy with anyone... well, that'd be high up in the list. Especially when they talk about the specifics of the campaign. That shit is more horrific than anything in the movie.

 Anyhow! Ellie, the teen, is basically in complete, unlikable stroppy little turd mode from the first moment we see her; So when the cellar of the house devours her and she goes missing, I half-expected the family to shrug, cut their losses and carry on as usual.

 But no - Keira goes on the warpath instead, and when the police can't turn up any clues and assume instead her daughter ran away, she starts investigating on her own. She finds that the stairs her daughter went missing on has numbered steps and a formula inscribed at the bottom, and Judaic characters inscribed on random places around the house.

 There's also the words Solve Coagula, which, along with a picture of someone posing with his two fingers facing up (but not the other two facing down, which kind of defeats the occult purpose) are a very clear reference to a famous alchemical image.

 Everything points to the occult, as Keira confirms when she consults with a math professor (Aaron Monaghan) and discovers the previous owner of the house was an alchemist as well as a mathematician. Incidentally, the math teacher she talks to used to be a normal lunkhead until he hit his head a couple years prior and kablam! instant math prodigy. I... yeah, I have no idea what they were thinking. It's played completely straight. That whole character introduction is bewildering.

 The mystery is interesting, but all of the answers are deeply half-arsed and underwhelming; The film plays with some cool ideas but fails to do any of them justice. It's not entirely witless - I do like the concept of someone walking down some stairs further than there are steps, for example. Which, incidentally, was the basis for the original short that got expanded into this movie. That never seems to work out, does it? You have a short built around a single cool idea, you better make sure you have a few more to fill out a feature - eighty minutes or so is a lot of time to fill!).
 Oh, and I've been remiss on reporting possessed toys in haunted house movies lately (there was a slinky in Shock, I think, as well as a swing used as the means to a curse). It doesn't begin to make up for my lapse, but here we get a nod to The Changeling with a ball falling down a set of stairs, and a haunted abacus. That one might be new!

 The acting is a little iffy, but I can't really fault the actors for failing to breathe life into these characters. As mentioned earlier, at least the technical side of things is well handled; It's a good-looking low-budget film. Things also do at least get a little nuts towards the end. I don't want to raise anyone's expectations - It's a clear case of too little, too late, but you know, at least there is some craziness. The puzzle-solving aspect should have been the film's strongest draw, but unfortunately the script is in no way able to deliver answers worthy of the questions asked or the subjects raised.

Let The Wrong One In

  Let the Wrong One In is... well, just look at the title. It's basically advertising itself as the next Saturday the Fourteenth, but for vampire movies. A goofy Irish horror comedy that repurposes the Shaun of the Dead formula to work with broad humour. OK, OK - broader humour.

 For a while, that's enough. This is nowhere near as good as any Edgar Wright movie, not on any level, but it delivers its silly jokes with decent regularity, the cast is willing to take the ridiculousness as far as they can, and there are some fun conceits here and there. The lowbrow humour does get old pretty quick, though.

 Baby-faced Matt (Karl Rice) is a good kid who runs into trouble when his dumbass, deadbeat brother Deco (Eoin Duffy) suddenly pops up at his home after being turned into a vampire by a bridal-dress-wearing creature of the night (Mary Murray). Deco's had troubles with addiction, so his impulse control is... a concern, to put it mildly. As if things weren't complicated enough, a vampire hunter (Anthony Head) soon arrives with his sights set on Deco. And the hunter was to be the groom-to-be of the head vampire (she got infected during her hen party at Transylvania, in one of the film's funnier scenes)... so that in turn leads the vampires to Matt, Deco and their mom (Hilda Fay). Will our protagonists be able to save their family, and put a stop to the vampire's bid to take over Dublin?

 The setup is convoluted, but not as complicated as I make it out to be. It's not really plot heavy-film, it's just that it works a little too hard to set up its lightweight farce.

 As for the humour, expect good-natured slapstick and a lot of easy jokes. It made me laugh a few times; The Transylvania-set introduction (not filmed in Transylvania) scores a great joke by setting up an old-school Hammer Vampire movie atmosphere, only to deflate it when a deranged hen party group runs into the frame, inflatable penis in tow. Later there's a cut from a (pretty gory) slashed neck to someone spurting mayo on some fries. Fun.

 The bulk of the jokes, though, are not quite that clever. Here's a couple of examples of the sort of stuff we're dealing with: There's a running gag where when Deco tries to become a bat, he farts instead. And when Matt tries to rouse an unconscious vampire hunter, the dignified old man mumbles "I don't want to go to school today, mom..."

 Writer/director Conor McMahon knows exactly the movie he wants to make, and he and his crew deliver without a fuss and with some good technical chops. There's a lot of blood in the film (most of which ends up covering poor Matt), some cool practical effects and some incredibly cheesy instances of CGI that, to be fair, fit the tone of the movie pretty well.

 There are some attempts to inject some style into the proceeds - smash cuts, montages and the like (I didn't mention Edgar Wright idly earlier) - but they seem a little bit off, as if the scenes needed to linger a little longer to feel organic. The script, meanwhile, as willfully dumb as it is, features a lot of nifty setups, callbacks and punchlines peppered throughout. There's no question that the level of craft here is much higher than a lot of better-known comedies. As for the acting.. the acting's ok. This is not the sort of movie you'd hold against anyone in it -comic exaggeration is the order of the day- but other than Deco none of the characters embarrass themselves with too much mugging.

 I dunno. It's agreeable enough. Other than some "haha, look, that conventionally unattractive person is horny", there's nothing wrong with its willingly dumb comic formula. My main issue with it - the fact that its more inspired moments during the first act raised my expectations a little - is an entirely self-inflicted problem. It's perfectly fine, and to be honest I don't think it ever tries to be anything more. If you're after a more likeable tale about Irish wasted youth taking on vampires, well... I'd direct you to The Boys from County Hell - but this is an all right second choice.

Oddity

 In roman times, a husband would gift their wife a silver wreath on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and a golden one at their fiftieth. This custom was kept over time, and in the twentieth century a host of other anniversary milestones were added (yay, capitalism!). The fifth anniversary is called a wooden anniversary, and this is the excuse Danni Timmins (Carolyn Braken, who's excellent in her dual roles) uses to gift her brother-in-law Ted (Gwilym Lee) a horrifying wooden mannequin.

 This is wrong on several levels. One, because the mannequin is a fucked-up wonder, a creepy rendering of a shrivelled mummy with hollow eyes and a mouth frozen in a horrifying scream. Two, because the gift comes one year after Ted's wife and Danni's sister Darcy (Braken, again) was brutally murdered. Not cool, Danni.

 The story in Oddity hinges around the character of Danni, who happens to be both blind and possessed of psychometric powers (she can read objects, like Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone), and how she rudely invades her ex-brother-in-law's life -and that of his new paramour (Caroline Menton)- at their rural cottage in an attempt to find out what really happened to her sister. What part the mannequin plays is not clear until much later.

 It's a high-gothic tale that's happy to throw in ghosts, a dash of paranormal phenomena, and some deliciously heinous sociopathy on top of the initial murder, all laced with a bone-dry sense of black humour. It takes its time carefully laying the infrastructure to support a handful of extremely effective jump-scares and a deeply weird but very satisfying finale. The whodunnit aspects are relatively simple (they have to be, with a cast this size) but the pieces of the puzzle are assembled with such care and imagination that it's still a pleasure to watch them fall into place with grim sense of inevitability.

 Writer/director Damian McCarthy has crafted a nasty, elegant, classically-built box of horrors that's still playful enough to remain unpredictable in its particulars. Meticulously composed at all times, its heavy emphasis on atmosphere (cinematographer: Colm Hogan) beautifully supports the script's rising pitch. And that fucking wooden mummy, sculpted by Paul McDonnell and a team of six, easily tops the creepy rabbit from McCarthy's previous movie Caveat (which makes a welcome cameo here) both in form and function.
 There's a smattering of gore, ugly enough to jolt, but it's not a particularly bloody film. It is weird, funny, engaging and properly scary, though; It's a shame it didn't receive much of a marketing push, because it should rightly become a classic.

All You Need is Death

 Plenty of folk horror movies use folk music, but I think All You Need Is Death is the first one to be about a killer folk song. Points for originality - there was an old Twilight Zone episode that sort of did something similar, but that's a deep cut.

 That's not even the most memorable element of the movie. That'd be the underground industry writer/director Paul Duane invented for his protagonists to try and break into.

 Anna (Simone Collins) and her boyfriend Alex (Charlie Maher), you see, track down folk songs to sell them to moneyed collectors. It's all simultaneously very grounded and hilariously bizarre; Anna gets into trouble when she's discovered recording a dude singing in a bar, for example, and later a meeting to try and sell one of their recordings is treated like a backlot arms deal. The young couple even attends an illicit-seeming seminar from Agnes (Catherine Siggins), an older pro in the field giving advice to prospective folk song hunters. Late-stages capitalism ethnomusicology - if you don't love the concept, I'm sorry but we can't be friends anymore.

 The plot - and the horror elements - kick in when the kids catch wind of the golden grail of their profession: a song that's been lost to time, one that no one has heard in centuries. Of course it's obscure for a reason - it's a bizarre cursed song from ancient Celtic times that declares "love is a knife with a blade for a handle". Our plucky folk exploiters manage to retrieve the song, but after they leave a mysterious force kills the singer dead.

 From there the movie takes some unexpected turns as Agnes wedges herself into the proceeds and the dead singer's son (the delightfully named Breezeblock, played by Nigel O'Neill) starts hunting down everyone involved.

 I can't say I'm a fan of the mid-movie twist. It leaves the story feeling pretty disjointed, and I just didn't really enjoy the second half as much as the first. But it remains interesting, and while not entirely successful, it does have some memorably batshit moments.

 It's a strange brand of horror that doesn't really seem to know what it's going for. The supernatural threat is not very cohesive: One of the deaths feels taken from a giallo movie, and then we get swirling shadow ghosts. A slow degenerative mutation into something or another brings in a little body horror, and there's even some light cannibalism. None of it's particularly scary, but it get fairly creepy, and the variety does lend it a particular kind of energy. It kept me on my toes.

 Stylistically it's all over the place. It starts out with some diegetic found footage, only to then settle on a more traditional indie horror look (I do wonder if the film was originally intended to consist entirely of Anna and Aleks's recordings). The ensuing low-key filming style suits the film well (cinematographer: Conor Rotherham), but a couple of stylistic flourishes don't do the film any favours. There's a handful of flashbacks to the events that the song describes, and I'm sorry to say they look fucking terrible; Ren-faire level stuff. There's also a sort of montage that's meant to be scary but it only made me roll my eyes. 

 Despite all of this the film works, in a sort of shambolic way, because many of its distinct elements are engaging and the film as a whole is very well written on a moment-to-moment basis. Some lovely music and great performances from Collins, Siggins and O'Neill don't hurt. And it has all the enthusiasm of someone who's saved up a hundred disparate ideas for a passion project; Reservations aside, I liked it, and hope it's successful enough that we get to see what these people cook up next.

The Watchers

 Mina (Dakota Fanning) is on the run from her past, working a menial job at a pet store in Galway. She hates herself so much she pretends to be someone else whenever she goes out at night, and of course there's some old unresolved family trauma behind it all.

 One good day her boss convinces her to drive a parrot out to a zoo in Belfast; Your typical "Go out and see the lovely Irish countryside!" "Drive down increasingly scenic and derelict roads!" "Get trapped in a haunted forest when the car inevitably breaks down!" You know, the usual. Never mind that Google tells me it's a four-hour drive down major roads.

 Lost in the woods Mina, bird cage in hand, is saved from... things scuttling beyond the treeline by Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), an old woman who rushes her into a brutalist-looking one-room house with one entrance (a reinforced iron door) and a huge one-way mirror that takes up a whole wall; Things outside can see in, but the occupants of the house can't see out.

 There's others in the house: Ciara (Georgina Campbell), whose defining characteristic is being distraught over the loss of her husband (whom we saw get taken by unseen assailants down a burrow in the prologue), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), a brash kid whose thing is being a sullen idiot.

 No time for introductions, though - as darkness falls, lights turn on in the house and the things that chased Mina in the woods congregate outside to watch her and the rest... do not much at all. Must get really boring out in the forest for the monsters to find whatever these four get up to to be entertaining at all.

 (In case you missed the obvious parallel, the only thing to watch in the house is an old DVD with one of those reality shows where sexy bone-headed idiots do whatever it is people do in reality shows. Har har.)

 Mina and company can wander out into the woods during daylight, as long as they follow a set of rules that Madeline somehow worked out. Mina causes some mild trouble, but not a lot happens until the gang find that there was a whole bunker under the house the whole time; It only took them months and months to find it. If I ever have to play an escape room, these jackasses are the last people I'd pick to help.

 Down in the bunker they find logs left by the creator of the whole place that hold explanations - stupid, stupid explanations - for the building and the beasties outside. Armed with that knowledge the crew plans an escape, and (in a fairly neat move that lends the movie a slightly non-standard structure)  there's an extended 'twist' that leads the film to a slightly more interesting resolution.

 It's well crafted, but not particularly good. While director Ishana Night Shyamalan shares her father's knack for building atmosphere and setting up interesting compositions (the cinematographer here was Eli Arenson, who worked on the very creepy Lamb), she stumbles badly in the script department with some really clumsy exposition and shoddy character work. It's probably safe to say Mina's underwhelming character arc and the pretty shoddy mythology comes courtesy of A. M. Shine's source novel, so she's off the hook for that.

 And it really is a terrible mythology. What could have been an interesting folk-horror exercise is unmoored from any real-world lore, replacing it with some high fantasy twaddle that's completely divorced  from reality to explain away the monsters. Other favorite dumb moments in the script: The fact that it apparently takes the same amount of time to demolish a reinforced metal door as it does to break down a huge pane of (already fractured) glass, and the whole explanation for how the building was built - one of the dumbest, most ludicrous things I've seen in a while. And have in mind I watched Alienoid recently.

 The horror is strictly PG-13 and relies overtly on jump scares - it rustles up a decent atmosphere to fuel its gothic aspirations, but sadly there's next to no tension. Effects are decent, there's a few creature FX shots, and the production uses its fairly low budget well.

 Whatever you might say about nepotism (and have in mind this movie was self-financed by M. Night Shyamalyan), Ishana Night Shyamalyan does well by the material; I'm much less of a fan of her script, but it's not as egregiously horrible as some of the stuff her father's put out over the years. It'll be interesting to see what she does next.

Caveat

 Isaac (Johnathan French) is recovering from an accident that made him lose some of his memory when Moe (Ben Caplan), a friend, offers him some money to go look after his niece Olga (Leila Sykes).

 The first caveat is that the girl lives alone in a remote, nearly uninhabited island. Her mother's gone missing, and she needs someone around because she suffers from some sort seizures that leave her catatonic for a while. The other, slightly major caveat is that Isaac is forced to wear a sort of leather harness chained to a flagstone in the basement that severely restricts his movement around the house. Moe insists that Olga will not allow him to stay in the house otherwise, but it's still a bit of a dick move to spring that at the very last minute; That guy's probably up to no good.

 Olga, when she's not under a catatonic spell, wanders around with a crossbow (which she explains she uses to hunt foxes). She mentions that her mother was quite mad before going missing, and that her dad killed himself when he got locked up in the attic (he shot himself out of extreme claustrophobia).

 For a while Isaac wanders around the house's dilapidated halls and rooms, experiencing mild hauntings of the sort that just might have a non-horror movie explanation. But then he finds a creepy-ass clockwork rabbit with bulging eyes that acts as a dowsing rod but for scary shit, and it helps him find the missing mother's corpse immured in the cellar.

 He confronts Olga about it, and things get a bit complicated - the mystery hinges on some of his lost memories, and as things develop he's forced to fight for his life to escape a tiny conspiracy that keeps shifting shapes as new events come to light.

 The pacing is a bit glacial, but that goes with its 'modern gothic' subgenre; A little too slow in parts, but it methodically builds up towards some truly effective scares. The requisite atmosphere is strong, thanks to some great work from cinematographer Kieran Fitzgerald and a very solid production design (that rabbit, crafted by Lisa Zagone, is a fucked-up wonder). It's an impressively realized, very focused low-budget production.

 Writer/director Damian Mc Carthy keeps his cards close to his chest at all times, giving out morsels of information with very little exposition to go with them. It's never arbitrary, though - there's a strong sense that there's a solid explanation for everything that's going on, including the seemingly supernatural events; Just what that explanation is, though, may vary from person to person.
 I'm still poking at it, trying to figure out this or that, the exact way its elements hang together - Caveat lingers in the imagination, and that's an unequivocal sign of success.

In the Land of Saints and Sinners

 A solid action/thriller set in Ireland at the height of The Troubles, In the Land of Saints and Sinners is an old-fashioned yarn that patiently positions Finbar, a recently retired contract killer (Liam Neeson, playing an Irish variation of his usual melancholy badass widower) in a collision course with a cell of IRA terrorists.

 Finbar is based off the sleepy town of Glencolmcille, where he takes orders from a local handler (Colm Meaney) and when he's not off killing people, he spends his days palling around with the local Garda (Ciarán Hinds) and his neighbour (Niamh Cusack).

 Early on he takes a contract where his 'customer' waxes philosophical in the face of death. Finbar goes through with the hit, but when he gets back he hands in his resignation and retires to do gardening and, he hopes, some good for the community.

 But you know how retirement usually goes for hitmen. Here it's not the criminal underworld that reaches back for him - instead, he notices that a little girl in the community is being abused. He quickly figures out that the culprit is one Curtis (Desmond Eastwood), and he resolves to come out of retirement temporarily to rid the world of the one asshole.

 It doesn't go smoothly, and Finbar has to be rescued by another hitman (Jack Gleeson, very funny and perfectly cast as a the very image of a 70's sociopath) who was keeping an eye on him. Even worse, the target happens to be the brother of one Doireann (Kerry Condon), the leader of an IRA cell that's gone to ground after a bombing that had a lot of collateral damage back in Dublin.

 Doireann starts shaking heaven and earth to find out what happened to her brother, and it doesn't take her long to find a trail that leads back to Finbar. So it's down to him to resolve the situation while keeping the damage contained. Not an easy ask when dealing with a bunch of terrorists with access to explosives.

 It's a simple story, well crafted, and magnificently acted. Condon makes for a fierce, unpredictable villain, and Neeson... well, it's easy to make fun of him for playing to type, but there's a reason he's allowed to do it time and time again. He's particularly soulful here, and there's something incredibly appealing to how he's trying to stave off his crushing world-weariness by trying to do some good, and his disappointment when it leads to more violence. The script (by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane) has a lot of Western overtones (Finbar literally hangs up his rifle!) which are underlined by a lovely soundtrack by the Baldenweg siblings. The dialog is excellent all around, with a couple of nice literary references and a surprising amount of pretty affecting grace notes towards the end.

 The action is good, but very straightforward and over with quickly - these are categorically not John-Wick-style assassins. Director Robert Lorenz focuses instead on the escalating tension and small character moments, with precious few stylistic flourishes, but he and cinematographer Tom Stern still manage to capture some very cool images.

 It's not, by design, the sort of movie that'll set the world on fire. But it is very, very satisfying.

Black '47

  Irish soldier Martin Feeney (James Frecheville) returns to his native Connemara from a long foreign stint with the British military to find his land in shambles. It's 1847, the great hunger has been ravaging the land for two years, and the English landowners have been using the widespread poverty as an excuse to evict famers from their holdings, causing deaths from exposure to skyrocket as the malnourished, bankrupt peasants are turned loose on the countryside.

 His mother and brother dead (she died of starvation, refusing to take the Anglican church's charity as it came on condition of conversion; His brother was hanged after stabbing a constable when their house was taken), Feeney aims to take his brother's remaining family and join the hordes of Irish folk fleeing to America.

 Unfortunately, he never gets the chance: One bright winter morning the local constabulary arrive with an order to tear the roof from his brother's house and evict everyone inside. Martin is held down when he tries to intervene, and can only watch as someone is shot while resisting and the women are turned out into the frozen wilds barefoot.

 When he returns from the constabulary the next day he finds his sister in law and her daughter frozen to death in the now roofless house.

 Pretty good basis for a revenge movie, right? Black '47 is a well-researched, very angry revenge fantasy that's not just about the particulars of its story, but the whole sad chapter in Irish and British history. An angry pointed finger at what some historians consider a deliberate attempt at genocide, courtesy of some long-dead people who still have statues up in parks and streets around London. Fun!

 And yeah, it almost is fun, because as it turns out Feeney has a particular set of skills, which he demonstrated amply the day he was taken to the constabulary in a pretty cool action scene. Killing, I mean. He's good at killing, which he does frequently during the movie, and with a grim sense of poetic justice.

 But that bit in the constabulary is the only properly exciting action sequence in the movie, because I guess the movie is sadly not insane enough to go all Django Unchained with the great famine. Oh well, at least it knows to go out with another big action setpiece.
 Instead of being all about angry Irish Rambo against the dastardly English, Black '47 focuses on a small army task force that gets sent to stop Feeney by any means. It's led by a young, pompous little shit (Freddie Fox), with constable Hannah (Hugo Weaving) as their tracker and a young private (Barry Keoghan) to tend to their horses. Hannah is very much the Col. Trautman figure, an old army buddy of Feeney's who provides running commentary on how the British picked the wrong man to push.

 So we mainly follow these three - soon to be four, with the welcome addition of a local guide played by the always soulful Stephen Rea - as they follow Feeney on his rampage, always two steps behind. It's an engaging tale, though there's quite a bit of on-the-nose exposition as the movie makes time so that the British villains can vent their loathsome practices vis à vis the famine situation. Jim Broadbent's Lord Kilmichael is all in for genocide, for example, happily comparing his work with the wiping out of the Indian nations in the US.
 Most of these stances are certainly well documented, but as asides in a genre movie they're a little too didactic. I'd probably appreciate them more if I didn't know about the points they're making already, though. Not to mention that the two-dimensional villains do make the film's premise, which is basically a slasher movie where an unstoppable murdering machine works his way up systemic injustice, much easier to swallow.

 Its desire to illustrate the ills of the time include a completely unnecessary aside into how the English were still exporting food during the famine. Again, true, and again, a bit preachy. The approach does have some problems, but its heart is int the right place and by making the oppressors into such clear bad guys it tilts the movie further into action territory, so it didn't actually bother that much.

 While it tries hard to remain on the period drama side of things, I'm comfortable calling it an action movie based on the amount of shootouts, chases and that pretty cool fight at the constabulary, and the opposition being such an unrepentant, openly evil (to our eyes) cast of villains*. Or maybe a pseudo-Western.

 The script (by P.J. Dillon, Pierce Ryan and Eugene O'Brien) has some pretty big superficial similarities to First Blood, but they remain skin deep - The Rambo here is not really a character, just a hook on which to hang a gritty revenge yarn festooned with history lessons.

 There's quite a few heavy hitters in the cast, and they all acquit themselves nicely, with (unsurprisingly) Weaving and Rea standing out. Frecheville is fine, but his character is only ever required to be stoic and convincingly badass, which he does handily.

 Director Lance Daly directs the action with some flair, and Declan Quinn's cinematography is beautiful - wintry and as drained of color as the story is drained of nuance, all miserable Irish landscapes with abandoned thatchless cottages. He also likes to shoot darkened interiors with natural light seeping in, some of the scenes resembling a sort of dutch chiaroscuro. Plenty of striking imagery here.

*: someone smarter than me would write a joke here about how the word villain comes from villeins, which are similar to the victims of this movie's villains.

Pilgrimage

 Somewhere in the southeastern coast of medieval Ireland, a tiny monastery keeps watch over a holy relic - the stone that was used to brain Saint Mathias more than a millennium prior (an event that's depicted in the film's prologue).

 Enter Frére Geraldus (Stanley Weber), a devout Cistercian monk who comes with a papal charter calling for a pilgrimage to bring the relic to the pope - Innocent III hopes the relic will help separate "the faithful from the faithless" for the next crusade, which is a really amusing detail given how the fourth crusade a few years before the events of this movie ended with the sacking of Constantinople and the pope's condemnation of the ensuing massacre.
 I have no idea if this was intended by scriptwriter Jamie Hannigan, but if so: hats off.

 A small problem: the relic seems to be cursed - both given the tales spun around it, and the visual language the film uses to depict it. Still, orders are orders, so a small group of monks is conscripted to take it to Rome. The group includes worldly, wise father figure Ciarán (John Lynch), young, idealistic Diarmuid (Tom Holland), and a mute layman in service to the monastery who's played by Jon Bernthal and thus predestined for badassery.

It's a matter of historic record that the only reason Jerusalem was lost was because they sent Jon Bernthal off.

 The pilgrimage is to take place through contested lands - at the time Ireland was being conquered by the Normans, so Geraldus asks the Baron de Merville (Eric Gordon) to help protect them from Gaelic warbands. The baron agrees, in exchange for absolution from his sins, and sends his son Raymond and a squad of knights to accompany them. It's quickly apparent, though that Raymond is up to no good, and soon the monks are running for their lives through hostile woods and moors and bogs. Good thing they have Jon Bernthal with them! By then it's established he has a crusader past, and it turns out he's pretty handy with a sword. And a shield. And... well, pretty much anything he gets his hands on.

 The action is brutal, gritty and pretty bloody - alas, mostly digital blood. The focus is more on the chases than in the fights, but what fights there are still have fairly complex choreographies; While they're not designed to show everything that's happening clearly, director Brendan Muldowney blocks things well and does a good job of keeping the flow of combat readable and engaging.
 The film is highly entertaining even when the monks aren't fearing for their lives. There's a lot of period detail to every scene, and while I'm sure that it's not all perfect, the fact that it's there is appreciated - I very much doubt that the French the English occupiers speak is period-accurate, for example, but, well, you've still got French-speaking Normans - who are at one point described as "grey foreigners" - invading Ireland for their king.

 Despite a fairly simple plot, it's a fairly complex, thorny movie that does right by the genre and even supports a little reading into as Diarmuid and Geraldus come to opposite interpretations of their travails. Add in some beautifully shot landscapes (cinematography: Tom Comerford), great music (Stephen McKeon), and a wealth of hilariously terrible haircuts, and we're cooking.

Unwelcome

 So you're making a movie about killer fairies. You can make a serious movie that's ashamed of being about killer fairies and explain them away with something 'serious' like, say, cordyceps, or downplay the fantastic elements. You could just embrace the silliness and bring the ridiculous to the fore. Or you could fucking own the fact that you're making a movie about killer fairies and take it seriously enough to allow it to work as a horror movie.

 Unwelcome walks that last, most difficult path, and that alone makes it worthy of respect. And then it has the stones to be a damn good killer fairies movie, too.

 Before getting to the emerald isle, there's a short prelude set in a housing estate somewhere in London. Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) has just found out she's pregnant, to her husband Jamie's (Douglas Booth) delight. It's an almost sickeningly sweet scene, like an advert for a joint bank account- right up to the point where some hoods that Jamie managed to piss off while getting Prosecco at the corner shop stage a very upsetting, violent home invasion.

 Cut to a few months later. The couple's inherited a property in the Irish countryside which comes with a few strings attached. One, it's a fixer-upper; two, the sweet old lady that welcomes Jamie and (a very pregnant) Maya to the house gets her to promise that she'll leave a bit of bloody, raw meat every night for the wee people that live in the woods out back. The red caps of Hellboy fame (Iron Shoes) actually belong to Scottish folklore, but there's a fair bit of overlap. These are pretty close to the Irish Far Darrig tales, if a bit more violent.

 Problems arise when the Whelan clan enters the picture, a bunch of ne'er do wells contracted to fix up the house. The builders from hell, led by an asshole who insists he be called 'daddy' (The great Colm Meaney), two thuggish siblings (Chris Walley and Jamie-Lee O'Donnell), and a slow-witted, physically imposing man (Kristian Nairn, kinda looking like an evil Jack Black).

 The patriarch holds his own in check, barely, but as soon as he's not there things go south pretty quickly with a slow, Straw Dogs style escalation. And then the murdergnomes arrive, their appetite for babies ('babbies!') well established.

 There's a lot of movie in here. The themes Mark Stay's clever, tightly-woven script works with may not be subtle or handled in the most original or particularly insightful way, but it's still a clever examination of violence and its consequences as viewed through genre trappings. Hell, just the fact that there's consistent themes at all should be celebrated. And while there's a rich, coal-black seam of humour running throughout the whole thing, it's restrained enough that it comes through as more of a perverse sense of fun that informs the film's pretty effective suspense and horror.

 Well, at least until the fairies arrive, looking like something out of a Brian Froud illustration. They're funny, expressive, and cool-looking mostly-practical effects that owe more than a little bit to Gremlins. But even when they arrive in all their giggly, stabby glory, the movie remains absolutely deadpan.

 

 Cinematographer Hamish Doyne-Ditmas makes great and frequent use of drone photography, and a lot of tinkering to make many of the scenes look slightly otherworldly. Elsewhere there's a great orchestral score from Christian Henson, a bunch of cool-looking sets, and some pretty gnarly gore. This is a pretty lavishly produced movie, at least for current genre standards.

 Your tolerance for it will depend on whether you can accept the tricky tonal tightrope-walking director Jon Wright (he of the also very fun Grabbers) is attempting and the amount of fantasy he allows into the picture. I thought he nailed it, but that's definitely going to be a point of contention. There are definitely some issues with pacing, some iffy dialog, and instances of the film showing its had a little too much.
 But these are all minor issues. Unwelcome's a fun, polished, nasty little slab of weirdness that punches well above its wee height.

The Banshees of Inisherin

 Pádraic (Colin Farrell) is a lovely guy. Everyone thinks so, even if he is a little dull. That's never been a problem, though, until his best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) abruptly starts ignoring him. Aggressively ignoring him. To the point that, when Pádraic keeps trying to mend the relationship, Colm threatens to cut off one of his fingers for every time Pádraic talks to him henceforth.
 This is especially hurtful, as Colm is a fiddler, and one of the reasons he wants to end the relationship is because he wants to spend his days composing music.

 Things escalate. Pádraic manages to piss off a violent Garda (Gary Lydon) and pulls a hilariously horrible trick on a poor man out of jealousy; Colm, meanwhile, makes good on his promise in horrifying fashion. There's mythical undertones as a Shakespearean crone (Sheila Flitton) foretells of doom - if only there was something in Irish folklore we could tie this to...

 The Banshees of Inisherin is a dark, dark comedy with a surrealist sensibility and a, let's say deliberate pace. The character's motivations and arcs all end up making sense, at least within the film's heightened, dramatic confines. I'm not that big a fan of writer/director Martin McDonagh's work (I tend to prefer his brother's movies), but he's always had a gift for writing dialog and it really shines here.

 All the interchanges are snappy, often very funny, and beautifully acted. Colm is a dumbass, but he's a very relatable dumbass; The script plays with common insecurities (especially in this age of impostor syndrome), social fears, and carries a lot of sincere emotional weight.

 The script is not subtle about its themes (it's set in the waning days of the Irish civil war, and the conflict is mentioned a few times) but the story stands by itself and is informed by them rather than trying to make any sort of sweeping statements. It also has a lot of tricky, emotionally complex moments that are pulled off with tact and flair, making the whole thing messy and more affecting.
 Add to that some gorgeous countrysides and beautifully lit interiors (cinematographer: Ben Davis), an excellent soundtrack including a lot of Carter Burwell along with some traditional celtic fiddles, and some lovely script flourishes like a recurring boathook, or Colm's relationship with his sister (Kerry Condon) and the village idiot (Barry Keoghan).

 It's a lovely movie, is what I'm saying - hilarious and affecting. Definitely my favorite from this director.

The Hallow

 This is a well-made but very goofy Irish horror movie from 2015 that I'd had in my radar for a while because, well, killer faeries. It doesn't quite deliver on that - or rather, it does, but it gives a 'scientific' explanation to rationalize faeries that somehow involves Cordyceps. David Attenborough has a lot to answer for.

 The Hitchens family - Adam (Joseph Mawle), Clare (Bojana Novakovic), their baby Finn (Wren Hardy) and their dog Iggy (Toddy) have moved to the backwoods of Ireland for work: Adam's been contracted by a logging company to do some scientific prep work in the preparation to cut down some ancient stretch of woodland.

 The locals don't take kindly to his presence, but it's not because he's working for corporations that are exploiting the forests for foreigners - the closest neighbour, Colm (Michael McElhatton), is leaning on them pretty heavily to go away because the woods belong to the hallow - mythical woodland beasties like Banshees or Leprechauns. It's an effective use of outsiders vs. locals social tension, but it never really goes anywhere, especially because it's pretty clear that the residents are never going to be the true menace. Just a bit of empty bluster, and a red herring.
 We're aware that there are monsters in the background, but Adam remains resolutely unconvinced there's anything odd going on, even when black rot chokes out the engine of his car.

 Luckily it's not too long - maybe halfway through - before the faeries hallow come out into the open and lay siege to the Hitchens family home. It's too silly to be scary, and the characters make so many bad decisions that it's hard to root for them; But on the plus side, it's very, very atmospheric, the monsters are good (think zombie Groots), there a couple of pretty out-there visuals and director Corin Hardy keeps things lively.
 It's not a good movie, but it's got plenty of things going for it. 

 The effects are all pretty good - it's not a very gory movie, but there's at least one wince-inducing bit of nastiness and some really neat imagery. The cinematography (by Martijn van Broekjuizen) is outstanding, providing a lot of cool-looking variations on people doing stuff in the dark. All the actors do well by the parts they're given.
 The issue here is the script (by director Corin Hardy and Felipe Marino). The cordyceps angle was not very original even when it came out (The Last of Us had come out two years prior), and to be honest, the way it's used is just as silly as if they had gone with goblins, Sidhe. or scary undead faeries. It also tips its hand early by showing some images on a book that predict how things will go later, fails to make the characters compelling and makes them behave like complete idiots several times...
 None of these are necessarily fatal mistakes, but there are enough problems that that they took me out of the movie. It's a shame because the script does do a few things right and hits upon a few cool images and ideas. Oh well.

The Boys from County Hell

 That Bram Stoker based Dracula on Vlad III, the Impaler, is a relatively modern theory - it arose in the 1950s. The man never really said much about it; Scholars who have studied his notes found that he made up many of the details, and never really knew much about the Wallachian Wanker (as I'm sure he was known in his time [citation needed]).

 There's a newer theory that Stoker actually based his most famous monster on a legend from his own country - Abhartach, 'the dwarf', a cruel tyrant/wizard (that's the worst type of tyrant!) that kept coming back from the grave and, in some tellings, gorged on people's blood.

 The Boys from County Hell, a 2021 Irish horror comedy runs with that. It's set in a fictional town (based on the actual site where Abhartach is said to rest) where Stoker once stayed a night and overheard the story. The locals milk it as much as possible, of course; the local pub is called The Stoker, and the locals have a bit of fun with the meagre few tourists that come for that tidbit of folklore. There's not a lot else to do in that particular corner of the Irish backcountry.

 Jack (Eugene Rowan), our protagonist, is keenly aware of that. He's a slacker in his early twenties with no prospects and no illusions. He mostly hangs out in the pub with his mates - William (Fra Free), Claire (Louisa Harland) and SP (Michael Hough) and whiles away his time as others make plans and move on with their lives.

 Things sour when, while drunkenly crossing a field one night, they're a victim of a random boar attack and William dies against what ends up being the Abhartach's cairn. As Jack watches horrified, the ground thirstily drinks up his friend's blood.

 But.. that's actually kind of unrelated to the plot. Things kick off a little later when Jack's father (Nigel O'Neill) enlists him and his surviving mates to help him build a road that needs to go right through... you guessed it, the evil dwarf's cairn. No self-respecting evil undead tyrant wizard is ever going to stand for that; there are some random detours in the way, but things do end up with a suitably epic (well, epic on a budget) vampire attack on the sleepy backwater town.

 There is a lot of this movie that just works; The landscapes are beautiful, the film-making assured, all the actors are great, their characters likeable (or not, as needed) and have plenty of great lines. The monster is excellent and has a truly badass way of drawing sustenance (none of that fang malarkey for The Dwarf!).
 Unfortunately the film is let down a little by a script that never really coheres its disparate elements into a compelling story. There are false starts, a whole sideplot which feels like it should be integral to the story but ends up feeling like a red herring... it doesn't feel like the movie ever figured out what to do with its plot elements. There's also the fact that the movie acts like it's a comedy but doesn't have that many jokes to back it up; This last one is honestly not much of a problem - I actually prefer this tone, which is a little more, say, American Werewolf in London than Shaun of the Dead - but there's something in the balance that just feels off.

 It's a shame that it's a bit of a mess, but as usual I'm making it sound a lot worst than it is - I actually enjoyed it a lot. Director/co-writer Chris Baugh and his co-conspirators have fashioned a very likeable mess, one that's over and done with in a brisk, fun stretch of ninety minutes and does manage to get some pretty funny jokes in. It might feel like a bit less than the sum of its parts, but there are some very good parts here.