Wickedly Evil (2023)

        Ultra low budget 'home-made horror' strikes again with the digital release (from 101 Films) of Garry Walsh's gory comedy set in Ireland.

After robbing Irish crime family the Lynches while dressed as Ninja frogs, three incompetent crooks hide out in a remote bungalow in the Irish countryside while they wait to hear form their contact. They have money, beer and drugs, and having consumed the latter are in no fit state to deal with what might just be supernatural goings-on during the night they have to stay there.

WICKEDLY EVIL has just a few of actors and for the most part the movie is restricted to the one location. In that way it resembles Sean Hogan's THE DEVIL'S BUSINESS. However, whereas Hogan's film was distinctly Pinteresque,  WICKEDLY EVIL is far more Chuckle Brothers in its execution. 

        That said, if that kind of comedy makes you laugh you'll find a couple of moments here of such silly comedy that they cannot help but raise a smile. I seem to say this about a lot of ultra-low budget UK & Irish product but if you're in the right mood and not at all demanding then WICKEDLY EVIL will help pass an otherwise uneventful evening. Here's a trailer:

WICKEDLY EVIL is out on Digital from 101 Films on Monday 13th November 2023

The Lodgers (2017)

One of the best horror films from last year's festival circuit gets a UK DVD release courtesy of Thunderbird.

Rural Ireland in the 1920s. Rachel (Charlotte Vega) and Edward (Bill Milner) are fraternal twins who live in a remote, crumbling mansion. They share the house with things unseen, who have imposed three rules on them: that they must never open the doors to strangers, that they must never leave each other completely alone, and that they must be in their bedrooms by midnight. 

On their eighteenth birthday their world changes with the arrival in the nearby village of Sean (Eugene Simon) a war veteran, who sparks a sexual awakening in Rachel. What he doesn't realise is that Rachel and her brother are the latest to suffer a curse that is ultimately going to impact on him as well. 

A fine gothic ghost story with a terrific sense of atmosphere, THE LODGERS benefits from excellent performances, beautiful and often clever photography, an intelligent script (by David Turpin) and assured direction by Brian O'Malley, who admits in the extras his ambition had always been to film a gothic ghost story.

THE LODGERS received its UK premiere at Abertoir last November, & Mrs Probert & I were lucky enough to get the director on his own afterwards for a lengthy chat. Mr O'Malley proved to be an extremely affable and knowledgeable individual who cited Jack Clayton's THE INNOCENTS (1961), Alejandro Amenabar's THE OTHERS (2001) and J A Bayona's THE ORPHANAGE (2007) as influences on his own picture. 

The director meets House of Mortal Cinema & Mrs House of Mortal Cinema

He also explained that both he and screenwriter David Turpin had wanted to write a ghost story set in that period that boasted a female lead, as so many of the stories from that period by writers such as M R James always featured men. He also told me the prosthetic limb we see in the movie was authentic for the time and that yes, all of those marvellous widescreen compositions we see in the picture were deliberately constructed to look like classical paintings. It was a delight to talk to someone so enthusiastic for the ghost story genre and I'll be interested to see what Brian O'Malley does next. 

Thunderbird's disc also contains a 22 minute making of, deleted scenes and a trailer. THE LODGERS is well worth a watch if you're a fan of subtle, understated but deliciously creative ghost stories. 

Brian O'Malley's THE LODGERS is out on DVD from Thunderbird Releasing on Monday 25th June 2018

Grabbers (2012)

If you ever go across the sea to Ireland...you may just get your blood drained by a giant tentacled monster from outer space. Unless you’re pissed that is, as alcohol is toxic to it. That’s the premise for this Irish love letter to the great giant monster movies of yesteryear.

Richard Coyle is the Alcoholic Policeman with a Past who has to welcome pretty temporary police officer Ruth Bradley onto a remote island off the coast of Ireland when she arrives to cover his regular colleague’s two weeks of leave. He’s not happy about it and pretty soon he’s even less happy when marine ecologist Russell Tovey starts chatting her up over the body of one of the mutilated whales that have been washed up on the beach overnight. Everyone is baffled by the discovery but that’s because they haven't seen the weird thing from outer space that crash landed in the sea at the beginning of the film. Nor have they seen the horrible fate of the fishermen who happened to be nearby in a prologue scene that wouldn’t be out of place in an old 1970s episode of DR WHO like Terror of the Zygons or Horror of Fang Rock.

It soon becomes apparent that the island is under attack from a great big tentacled gloopy monster that has laid eggs all along the beach. These eggs hatch out, giving rise to a whole load of tiny baby gloopy monsters that are just as hungry for human blood as their parent. The only thing that can deter them is if your blood alcohol levels are punishingly high, which is the excuse for everyone on the island to indulge in a lock-in in the island’s only pub as a storm rages outside and the creatures gather to attack.

Reminding me of everything from Terence Fisher’s 1966 Planet Production ISLAND OF TERROR to Ron Underwood’s TREMORS and the Dr Who I've mentioned above, GRABBERS is an old-fashioned monster movie that’s loads of fun. It’s been described as FATHER TED vs ALIENS and that’s probably the best way to approach it. There’s very little in the film that’s original (the idea of getting pissed to avoid being attacked popped up in William Fruet’s INVASION OF THE BODY SUCKERS aka BLUE MONKEY back in the late 1980s) but there’s a simple pleasure to be had in this movie which apparently has done extremely well in its homeland. The FrightFest screening I attended was apparently the only chance I would get to see GRABBERS ‘in this form’. I can only guess what that means, although admittedly some of the Irish accents at their most drunken might need a bit of dubbing for overseas markets. Other than that it’s a gleeful monster romp with likeable characters, an engaging setting and it deserves to do well.

Isolation (2005)

Nobody told me Ireland has been knocking out some cracking little horror films over the last few years, but with DOROTHY (already reviewed on this site), GRABBERS (coming soon) and this I’m going to give Ireland its own category. Bought blind at the video shop the other day ISOLATION was far better than we were expecting and may just have created a whole new horror subgenre.

All is not well on a remote Irish farm where it never stops raining and the only ground surface seems to consist of mud of varying runny consistencies. Penniless farmer Dan (John Lynch, who’s excellent) has agreed to allow one of his cows to be used in a genetic experiment organised by the obviously villainous John (Marcel Iures). The cow is pregnant but it’s going to be a difficult birth. Vet Orla (Essie Davis) gets bitten by whatever is growing inside the cow during a routine examination, and when the calf is eventually born, after great difficulty, both it and the mother have to be put down. The calf is inexplicably found to also be pregnant, but with a number of mutant hybrid creatures that are presumably a by-product of the experiment. The mutant foetus things aren’t dead, however, and it turns out they have the potential to infect the rest of humankind. John orders the place quarantined and the search is on for the creatures.

I don’t know if there are any grim veterinary horror films out there but ISOLATION may well be the first, and very very good it is, too. The entire film is seriously dark and unpleasant, the characters all feel real, and the animal stuff made me wonder if the picture hadn’t been made by a bunch of vets who wanted to make a horror film. The nail gun they use to kill the calf and its mother looks like the kind of thing that’s probably used in real life, and the horrible gloomy surroundings just add to the sense of nihilism and hopelessness that doesn’t let up for the entire picture.

With all that going on you might think that the appearance of mutant cow foetuses might ruin it all, but not a bit of it. The creatures are barely shown, and when they are there’s not a pixel of CGI in the house - just horrible-looking puppets shown very briefly so as not to diminish their effect. If you need a description the only thing I can liken these weird, bony creatures to is the gun Jude Law makes out of his own teeth in EXISTENZ. In  fact, probably the best way to describe ISOLATION is a Grim Irish Cronenberg Veterinarian Horror picture. I thought it was great and I can’t believe it isn’t better known. It’s on this site because it deserves a lot of love and attention and I hope this review helps it to get some. Much, much more Irish horror, please!

Dorothy (2010)

Made in 2008 but not getting a UK release until two years later, here’s a modern EuroHorror that’s definitely deserving of wider exposure and more love than it seems to have got so far. Also going by the alternate title of DOROTHY MILLS in other territories (I've put up the Spanish  poster as it's a bit more interesting that the UK one), DOROTHY is a French-Irish coproduction. It’s also a lovely slow burner of a horror picture that boasts a complex plot very well told, some splendid performances, and a delicious atmosphere of rain-drenched gloom in an authentic-feeling isolated country community.

Dublin psychiatrist Jane van Dopp (Carice van Houten) travels to a remote island to make a clinical assessment of Dorothy Mills (Jenn Murray), a teenager who, while babysitting, allegedly ended up trying to strangle her tiny charge. From the outset strange things happen. Jane is run off the road by a car chase and ends up in the river, her car a right off and the viewer wondering if we’re perhaps going to be treated to a modern version of CARNIVAL OF SOULS. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that’s not exactly how things pan out but once Jane meets Dorothy, who seems to suffer from a really quite scary variant of Multiple Personality Disorder, the plot thickens and with the island community hostile and obviously involved in some weird cult that involves using Dorothy as a conduit to talk to the dead it’s pretty clear that things are going to end badly. I haven’t even mentioned that Jane is in mourning following the accidental death by drowning of her young son, or that someone (or something) on the island is vandalising property and murdering livestock with a very specific purpose in mind.

I won’t reveal much more because this really is one of those films that’s a delight to discover without knowing too much about it. What I will say is that as the film went on I became more and more intrigued, with the result that I really didn’t know what was going to happen from one minute to the next, and I certainly didn’t see any of the extremely satisfying ending coming. Reviews on the internet have compared this to THE EXORCIST (it isn’t) and THE WICKER MAN (there’s the isolated community with a secret but there all similarities end). With a superb sense of rural grimness DOROTHY does a fine job of telling an involved story without ever becoming confusing, and hats off to director Agnes Merlet for keeping everything on track. I must confess I hadn’t previously heard of any of the personnel involved with this film except for Gary Lewis who plays the priest-cum-doctor in charge of the community (he was in VALHALLA RISING), van Houten (who was in INTRUDERS, also reviewed on this site) and Rynagh O’Grady who played the wife who was always trying to kill her husband in FATHER TED. Merlet’s follow up picture was called HIDEAWAYS and has yet to have a UK release but I may well catch it when it does.