★★★
“Hey-ho… Let’s go!”
Behind a remarkably generic and forgettable title sits an entirely reasonable slice of low-budget Irish action-horror. It’s clear creator Kavanagh knows what has gone before, and if the resources here don’t allow her to reproduce them on anything approaching the same scale, she knows her limitations and works well enough within them. Besides, who can resist a film that works a Ramones lyric into its dialogue? Taryn (Hogan) feels responsible for the death of her little sister, abducted and killed on the way home from school. She gets a chance to do something about it, when approached by the mysterious Falstaff (Parle) after her sister’s funeral. He reveals a secret world of demons and sacrifices – Taryn’s sister being one of the latter – and offers Taryn a chance for revenge, if she’ll come and work for him.
We don’t actually learn much of the above until some way into this. We start with the heroine stalking and enthusiastically decapitating one such demon, only to be arrested by the local cops. They’re peeved she won’t reveal where the severed head of the victim is located – not least because she insists this is necessary to ensure he stays dead. Falstaff, meanwhile, has not intention of letting his minion remain in police custody, and informs them there will be a fresh murder every 24 hours they do not let her go. For, it turns out, Falstaff has an entirely separate and significantly less helpful agenda with regard to Taryn, and has simply been using her towards his own ends.
The main asset this film has is Hogan, whom production kinda lucked into, after the original actress pulled out two weeks before shooting started. For Hogan is a third-degree black belt in Shotokan karate, with a slew of titles both national and international. The physicality her experience allows her to bring to proceedings can’t be learned at drama school, and bumps up the action credibility several notches. Given this, it’s a shame that we don’t get see more of her: after the opening head-removal, Taryn is then locked up in custody for the rest of of the first half, and we also have to go through the flashbacks explaining how she became a demon hunter. It might have been better for the makers to figure out whether they wanted to tell an origin story or subsequent tale: this is a little of each, and both likely suffer as a result.
The lazy comparison would be Buffy, but that can be applied to virtually anything where a young woman is battling supernatural creatures. Bloody Mallory is probably closer, with its heroine who is more surly and aggressive than frothy and ironic, and the dark tone here has echoes of The Crow as well. Kavanagh was working on the project for close to a decade before it reached the screen. The struggle to find funding is apparent in some rough edges, and her lack of experience in a story that can’t sustain itself for the full duration. Yet it’s still remarkably polished for not just a first feature, close to Kavanagh’s first narrative film of any kind, with her background being mostly in music videos. I’m looking forward to seeing where she (and Hogan) might go from here.
Dir: Zoe Kavanagh
Star: Niamh Hogan, Alan Talbot, Michael Parle, Aisli Moran