Didn't Grab Me
Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) finds herself posted to Aran Island when a colleague goes on two weeks vacation leaving her to work with Garda Ciarán O'Shea (Richard Coyle). But her arrival coincides with a lot of strange occurrences as dead whales wash up, people vanish and a fisherman discovers an alien sea creature. They soon discover these creatures are threatening to over run the island except they seem defenceless against anyone who has high blood alcohol levels which mean the police are going to have to get everyone plastered to survive.
"Feck!" is a funny word when you here it proclaimed in an Irish accent, it is still funny about the 5th time you hear it but then when you start to hear it a movie more and more you begin to wonder whether the director was just relying on "Feck" to amuse or whether there was anything else in the first place. That is sort of how I felt as I watched "Grabbers" because this is the sort of movie which when it does something the first time it is amusing but after a while you start needing something else and it doesn't deliver it. So we get some "Fecks", we get an over the top English character, we get some equally over the top Irish stereotypes and some initially entertaining special effects. But once the Feck effect wears off you have nothing decent to replace it.
Now it seems like I am in the minority here as it seems more people than not, or at least those who give a feck to review it, liked it. But once you get past those effects and accents what you have left is a 60s b-movie with an alien creature terrorizing a small community. Okay so we have the daft idea of everyone having to be drunk so they won't get attacked but this only culminates in a noisy free for all in the pub. Maybe that's realistic but drunken shouting does not make good cinema.
What this all boils down to is that "Grabbers" didn't grab me at all and it felt like a movie which had a few tricks to try an entertain with. But those tricks, every feck and moment of special effects was all too familiar and to be honest for a comedy it wasn't that funny and as a horror it was short on that too.
