New Irish Horror/Sci-fi/Adventure Film

There’s an interesting new film from Irish Director Neasa Hardiman available in April. Set aboard and Irish fishing boat in the Northern Sea, it offers some fascinating parallels with the practical impacts of infection/epidemiology. Neatly packaged in a horror/sci-fi/adventure-style story akin to Alien or The Abyss, this does seem to be a bit of a film for our times.

I’m not sure how much of an Irish production this is and I haven’t seen the movie as yet but the trailer looks interesting and the international cast give some credible performances (and accents, for once!).

The blurb for the movie is as follows:

Siobhán’s a marine biology student who prefers spending her days alone in a lab. She has to endure a week on a ragged fishing trawler, where she’s miserably at odds with the close-knit crew. But out in the deep Atlantic, an unfathomable life form ensnares the boat. When members of the crew succumb to a strange infection, Siobhán must overcome her alienation and anxiety to win the crew’s trust, before everyone is lost.

You can find the trailer for it here:

Finn (cough) MacCool versus Ming The Merciless

Because I tend to focus predominantly on culturally accurate Irish ‘mythology’, I come across a lot of examples where that mythology ends up being misrepresented or manipulated into something it’s not. This is what we find with the following teaser trailer for a film called “Finn MacCool” (sadly, despite the character’s Gaelic origins, the Gaelic name wasn’t used).

As far as I can tell, the trailer is a promotional piece because the film was never made. This happens sometimes when a movie’s being proposed and talked-up but no funding’s obtained to complete it. Either way, though, you have to give the producers credit for using Irish actors (or at least someone who can successfully put on an Irish accent – not looking at you, Tom Cruise and Christopher Walken!) although the Ming the Merciless character who plays … actually, I’m not entirely sure who he’s meant to be, does seem a bit miscast. Having such a strong Dublin accent several centuries before Dublin ever came into being, well….

It’s easy – and probably unfair – to mock the trailer as it obviously had a tiny budget and it’s very much a product of its time (I had thought it dated from the seventies or eighties but it was actually prodcued in 2004/2005). The limited budget probably led to the strange hair-dos and dodgy special effects, although the scale of the battle scene is quite impressive. The latter is marred somewhat however, by the way the people who get killed spin off in a pirouette (twirling off to the ground with an enthusiasm they clearly didn’t have when they were fighting). In some ways, it looks as though the battle scenes were choreographed by Ballet Ireland!

It’s harder to be forgiving about the plot however, which seems to involve  Fionn – sorry, Finn – fighting Vikings (who didn’t turn up in Ireland for another 700-800 years after the time period which the Fenian Cycle is usually associated with).

I used to be more cynical but, over the years, I’m actually grown fonder of this piece of this piece film as it’s a useful reminder of how people saw the whole Fenian Cycle twenty years ago, how insecure we were in terms of our own culture and how easily we were influenced in our attempts to adapt our stories to monkey overseas productions. At the same time, I also have to give credit where credit is due, in that at least the producers attempted a more Irish production of our greatest mythological hero.

There was a rumour going around some years ago about a movie on Cú Chulainn being developed by Michael Fassbender however that now seems to be languishing in “development hell”. Maybe one day however, we’ll have something to compare with this trailer!

An Historical Irish Revenge Thriller

For those with an interest in film, an interesting ‘Irish film’ premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February this year and although I’ve been keeping an eye out for it on the international scene, it seems to have pretty much disappeared beneath the radar. Entitled ‘Black 47,’ it refers of course to 1847, the nadir of The Great Famine – An Gorta Mór.

Irish films based on An Gorta Mór are pretty few and far between (I can’t actually think of any), probably because as a tragedy and cultural injustice so epic in scale, the topic is still a somewhat sensitive subject, at least for our older population.

Fortunately, director’s like Lance Daly are young enough to avoid the worst of that burden so it’ll be interesting to see how he manages to balance that interaction between respect and voyeurism.

Daly was smart enough to approach the topic through the medium of a historical thriller/revenge movie – the plot basically concerns an Irish soldier who deserts and returns to the west of Ireland to seek revenge during the famine. Interestingly, Daly chose two Australian actors in the two major roles (Hugo Weaving and James Frenchville). The latter – in the attached scene – speaks pretty good Irish but I must admit I’m curious as to what it’ll turn out like.

Has anyone seen it?