MPAA Rating: NR
Director: Jon Wright
FilmPulse Score: 5/10
Jon Wright’s Grabbers feels like a trip down memory lane, it harkens back to the creature-features of the 80s and early 90s. The creatures always need a few readily-available resources to live while, through the law of opposites, there is usually one trick that will either kill them or, at least, disable them for a period of time. In Grabbers, like most films of its ilk, it’s rather simple; the Grabbers need water and blood to survive and the only thing that can protect you from the grabbers is alcohol. An exuberant amount of varying alcoholic beverages and since Grabbers is set in Ireland the residents should have no trouble at all defending themselves.
Grabbers stringently sticks to the creature-feature formula by starting off with the all-important origin and introduction of the grabbers. Streaming across the night sky finally plummeting into the ocean, a small stretch away from a fishing boat with a three-man crew who subsequently become the inaugural casualties, snatched out of their vessel with a spear-like tongue. Later a lobster fisherman, Paddy (Lalor Roddy), catches one of the little creatures with one of his lobster traps, taking it home with him and storing it in the bath.
Of course, while all of these strange occurrences are happening we also have ourselves a little odd-couple thing going on between Garda Ciarán O’Shea (Richard Coyle) and the newly-arrived Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley). Ciarán happens to be a walking stereotype – a small town Irish police officer/avid daydrinker; while, Lisa is your standard rigid workaholic that slowly reveals a chipper and cordial personality, with a little coaxing from Ciarán and the locals. Slowly, a little glimmer of a romantic possibility between Ciarán and Lisa begins to develop, then the addition of Marine Psychologist…sorry Biologist, Dr. Adam Smith (Russell Tovey) creates the formation of a love triangle with Ciarán and Dr. Smith vying for Lisa’s attention which gives the film it’s heart.
The team learns that the (Paddy-coined and reluctantly agreed upon) grabbers have an aversion to alcohol, since they live off of blood – if that blood is toxic, they die (or at least they are disarmed for a period of time). This is gleaned after Paddy has a run-in with his bathtub-living grabber after a night of pints, shots and swigs; all the village has to do is get Paddy-level drunk (a staggering 0.2 blood alcohol content) and wait them out while Ciarán and Lisa execute their plan with the help of a couple, hand-picked locals.
Everything plays out exactly as one would expect, but one cannot really hold it against the film because early-on Wright makes it pretty clear that Grabbers will be a nostalgic-laden trip filled with fairly familiar genre-specific developments. There is a fair amount of comedy throughout the film, exchanges between the local characters and, of course, during the execution of their well thought out plan…while being obliterated. It just seems like writer Kevin Lehane and Jon Wright missed a great opportunity to harvest an abundance of comedy with the drunken residents wielding nail guns, pellet guns sans pellets and water pistols filled with petrol. Grabbers does wander from the creature-feature formula occasionally with some beautifully composed aerials and landscape shots of the surrounding picturesque, lush terrain of Donegal and Antrim counties; you usually do not see those types of shots in a horror-comedy, but then again how do you pass up the opportunity to showcase the verdant, rolling landscapes of Ireland. Still, Grabbers might not contain anything revolutionary or mind-blowing, but it is a briskly-paced little jaunt of a film that some might find thoroughly enjoyable.
