Retro Raunch Revisit

GRABBERS (2012)
Richard Coyle, Ruth Bradley, Lalor Roddy, Russell Tovey, David Pearse, Bronagh Gallagher, Pascal Scott
Directed by Jon Wright
Released January 23, 2012 (Happy 10th Anniversary)
A sailor at sea is on his boat at night. As he swabs the deck, a zooming blue light passes overhead and crashes in the distance. Thinking it's a distress flare and acting as skipper, he and his 2-man crew reach the location. As the fishermen investigate, both shipmates are fatally pulled overboard by a lethal hentai-ish tentacle in the water. Having sent an SOS on the wheelhouse CB radio, the skipper arms himself with an axe but is ambushed by something unseen from above. In the morning, garda (police officer) Lisa Nolan arrives by ferry to Erin Island (off Ireland's West Coast) to meet her new colleague, Ciarán O'Shea, who's coming off one of his regular hangovers. She's on temporary loan from Dublin while the Chief is on 2-week vacation and had flippantly stated 'the town will be dead' with everyone going on holiday. Oh, if only he could know what's in store with that ominous statement... Cynical veteran O'Shea is a grumpy hard drinker who resents his female cohort for being an enthusiastic & dedicated straight arrow which has impressed the bosses. He feels he should naturally be in charge. The tourist island's small rural community is soon abuzz after mutilated whale corpses wash up on shore which are not the work of JAWS but of bloodsucking squiddy aliens. Paddy Barrett, the town wino, survives an attack after first removing one of the creatures from his lobster trap (which he then dumped in his bathtub as a souvenir only to have it get loose, then facehug him like John Hurt in ALIEN before detaching itself, and die from being stomped). Paddy brings the dead creature [which if I'm not mistaken suddenly seems smaller] to the lab of dorky British marine biologist/ecologist Dr. Adam Smith who has the hots for Nolan right away, and determines that Paddy's high blood alcohol level was toxic enough to withstand the "grabber" -- Paddy's dubbed name for it which everyone thinks is dumb -- which needs blood & water to survive.

The creature is also an adult female, and an intrigued Paddy wonders if he can sell the dead remains on eBay. When O'Shea and Nolan check out the house of a woman pulled up a chimney (while her husband was watching NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD right at the part where Johnny utters his famous last words), they then grab Paddy and the trio head to a beach cave. There, they find a nest of eggs buried in the sand and flee a large grabber, the adult male. Back at Dr. Smith's lab, O'Shea survives an attack from the female originally presumed dead but revigorated from a sprinkler. Saved, thanks to the literal brewery saturating his body, O'Shea and his 2 companions stomp the female to death. Startled from the encounter, O'Shea tries to contact the mainland for help but he is dismissed by the Coast Guard, and an approaching massive storm cuts off both communication & help. Further adding to the dangerous grabber threat will be the rain allowing the grabbers to traipse about the island with more ease. Inside a church, he & Nolan have the locals rounded up to take shelter (a "lock-in") at a pub where the tavern attendees from relative safety start to relax when the owner, Brian Maher, dishes out free drinks. Everything seems legit and as O'Shea takes the initiative to stay sober so he can organize the island's protection (and for him this is a big deal to not get stumbling tanked), the remaining inhabitants -- including by-the-book bubbly Nolan who's never been soused in her life -- all get sloshed in mass binging as the downpour hits. With the Stout & ale flowing-a-plenty and the beer goggles chugging on in the piss-up, Nolan confesses in their patrol SUV that she came to the island to breakaway from her sister who got all the family attention, and although yin & yang opposites, she tells O'Shea she is attracted to him inspite of rebuffing him earlier while he was shitfaced when putting the moves on her.

When Una the raunchy pub landlady (alongside bar patrons all citing Nolan's prettiness) tried to hook up both gardas, Nolan wasn't having any of it but as she now makes a pass at him, in a class act he skips the opportunity to take advantage of her. He also reveals that the reason for personally drowning in alcoholism from heavy benders is due to his wife having run off with another bloke. Una incidentally is also Brian's wife and under the impression that all the patrons are there to celebrate her birthday. If only. When the creatures gather from the wetness increasing their activity, little sluggy newborn grabbers unsuccessfully swarm a physician named Jim who is outside urinating. He's briefly rescued by the 2 gardas only to be killed by the male which also destroys the patrol vehicle, forcing the duo inside the pub. Dr. Smith attempts to take a picture of the male and believes being fueled up on booze will make him resistant to being dinner, but he is swatted into the air, clear across the horizon and killed. With the taps run dry and kegs outside, the assembled group take cover upstairs (as the pub also serves as a hotel) as the maggoty baby grabbers burst in. A wasted Nolan in her giggly blotto state, inadvertently causes panic for revealing the danger everyone is in, while invalidatingly saying they are all fine. As the gardas devise a means of escape, Nolan accidentally torches the pub while fighting off the male. In the ensuing flames, she and her partner distract it from attacking the upstairs and it proceeds to follow them both as they take off in Brian's pickup truck to a nearby quarry. Figuring they can destroy this big ugly rolling sack of sushi once n' for all, their plan is to use a construction digger to hold the grabber off ground and leave it exposed to the sun where it will die from dehydration. Murphy's Law has other plans for their trap and the male shows up. Nolan uses a bulldozer where quite unexpectedly for her, she angrily calls it a cunt(!) and pins it to the bottom of a gravel pit.

With its flurry of fleshy multi-limbs, the creature grabs O'Shea by the waist and pulls him towards its maw but he drops a bottle of Paddy's homemade liquor into its mouth. The highly potent moonshine repels the grabber which lets him go. Nolan uses a flare gun to set off an explosion of oil barrels and the male is killed in the blast. With the storm clearing up, both gardas walk back to town in the morning and kiss, with a new O'Shea having thrown his flask away. Goodbye swigging and hello sobriety. Unbeknownst to all on Erin Isle is the extent of spawning & multiplying by the parent creatures that took place, and we close to the hatching of more little bastard grabber eggs on the shoreline. GRABBERS is a funny sci-fi horror comedy whose grippy, entertaining B-movie irreverence is a happy marriage of The Cornetto Trilogy, THE BLOB, ATTACK THE BLOCK, SLITHER, CRITTERS, GREMLINS, a less-refined but more energetic Kang and Kodos from THE SIMPSONS, and quite blatantly Ireland's version of TREMORS. And for all the abundant references, still manages to find its own distinct niche and avoid being a premature ripoff even as its tone also plays like a slick hidden tribute to the many 1950's drive-in sci-fi classics (and turkeys) that featured interstellar behemoths and deformed oversized gargantuans. And theme wise, there's a clever winking role reversal here in regards to the belligerent outer space aliens of old: As alcohol is the Achilles heel to the vulnerable grabbers and proves their undoing, this is infact a twist on INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN (1957) wherein the bulbous-headed & bug-eyed 'little green men' of that picture used retractable needle fingernails to inject people with pure alcohol so humans could die from blood poisoning. [The movie was remade in 1965 as THE EYE CREATURES and in both low-budget versions, the aliens die from the bright glare of car headlights].

Besides the heavily played-up shameless stereotype of getting rip-roaringly plastered, also on display is a longstanding separate UK tradeoff: the common Irish are seen as talkative and relaxed though quickly prone to excitement and colorful profanity, while the stuffy egghead Brit is a stiff-upper-lipped and privileged elite. [No doubt any Scots would have been volatile countrymen with parallel inebrious consumption matched by their purported tight-fisted penny pinching]. These provincial parochial idiosyncrasies however are all in good jest making satiric fun of cinematic cultural notions regarding compatriots. There is a curious paradox when it comes to international drinking: No nation likes being accused of being a population of perpetually intoxicated and obnoxious slovenly drunkards, but when it comes to bragging rights, that same nation is not immune to taking celebratory pride with copious next rounds in how much they can drink everybody else under the table. For stein and country! Still, nothing is deliberately depicted in an inconsiderate mean-spirited manner to evoke any real offense, so hopefully none is taken. With a mixture of humor & gags from played straight and light hearted to full-on hilarious, the dialogue and character interactions also come off as a cross between FATHER TED meeting THE GUARD. As citizens disappear and severed heads turn up, it's interesting to note that there are no guns. And the closest thing to "arms" are a nailgun, a board with a nail in it, a pellet gun with no pellets, a frying pan, and petrol-filled super soakers to act as flamethrowers which are unconventionally lowbrow yet hurriedly improvising for these amateurs as the isolation & tension takes hold. The idea of alien aquatic sea monsters (looking like toothy Lovecraftian Cthulhu octopuses with whiplashing tongues) that are severely allergic to alcohol is perhaps equally akin to the martian invaders from WAR OF THE WORLDS being defeated by bacterial flu (whose immune systems were mortally weakened by sickness).

What could have failed as a stupid, full of slapstick one-joke premise for GRABBERS actually works and has that near-believability component thanks foremost to the great chemistry of the garda duo who predictably put aside their differences. Their forged relationship is the anchor here that verges on quirky rom-com because of the unlikely mismatched pairing, but the affection is genuine and free of being sentimentally sappy. As alcohol is easily positioned as the mighty slam dunk, defense mechanism-champion that saves the day, O'Shea and Nolan are themselves heroic from the situation turned nuts. When both are not generating faint sparks as love interests [whereas 2 men would have made this another "buddy film" about bonding], Nolan is a professional stickler who does initially disagree & disapprove but she's also that stick in the mud who succeeds in winning you over because she's so damn adorable in pulling her weight. And her clumsy fall down a flight of stairs and declaring herself fine is actually one of her finer moments. O'Shea demonstrates how effective and responsible he can be when the urgency calls for it. In addition are endearing commendable performances from the feckin' gobshite residents who embrace being three sheets to the wind; a decent pace albeit a little pedestrian; beautiful quaint scenery (filmed in County Donegal); and slimy CGI monster fx which are very good and detailed [SyFy Channel take note, this is how it's done]. The rainstorm not always convincingly stormy enough, and the relative no-gore zone are the movie's small weaknesses. And speaking of weather and background, filming took place during one of Ireland's worst winters causing regular delays. For whatever external problems, incredibly none of those complications show. In closing, GRABBERS is firmly tongue in cheek and definitely worth raising a couple pints of Guinness to. [Whether or not you stay sober or get blackout hammered is entirely up to you].