In the Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

The Republic of Ireland, 1973. Finbar Murphy (Liam Neeson) has killed for money from his boss Robert McQue (Colm Meaney) and/or a cause for decades now, but is really getting tired of the killing and what it does to him and the world. An encounter with a particularly dignified victim closes the deal for him, and he decides to retire. McQue isn’t going to make trouble for him, and they’ve both kept their dirty work as far away from their homes in County Donegal as possible, so there’s little danger for anyone in the retirement.

Why, Finbar is even buddies with the local Garda man, O’Shea (Ciarán Hinds). Of course, men like Finbar never can truly get away from their pasts, and when he realizes the visiting uncle of a neighbour who is also clearly an IRA member is abusing a little girl he’s friendly with, he decides to straight up murder the guy.

The killing itself doesn’t go quite as slick as Finbar hoped – youngsters carrying knives now is a new one to him –, but that’s not going to be his main problem. Rather, his victim wasn’t just some IRA guy with particularly bad manners on a visit, but actually part of a cell hiding out after a bombing that went a bit too well. Worse still, leader of the cell is Doireann (Kerry Condon), who just happens to be the sister of Finbar’s victim. Doireann, capable of switching from friendly to disturbingly violent at the drop of a hat, is not a woman who takes kindly to the disappearance of her brother.

There are of course quite a few clichés about 70s Ireland in Robert Lorenz’s In the Land and rather a lot of the standard tropes of the Neesonsploitation genre as well. However, Lorenz and the script by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane handle most of these clichés – let’s just ignore the subplot around a junior killer played by Jack Gleeson in that regard - with some wit and a degree of delicacy, taking a bit more care with the characters than about half of your typical Neeson outings from the last few decades have done – and of the next decade will do.

While he’s still better at the violence than a man of his age would be, the film goes out of its way to keep him in the realm of the human, an opening Neeson of course uses to do some actual acting. Neither his character nor his development are particularly deep, but they are complicated enough to be engaging. Specifically the contrast between the actual kindness and consideration Finbar shows other human beings and the trained efficiency with which he commits violence when on the job works very well indeed.

In this approach to violence, Finbar stands in marked contrast to Doireann, who does have sudden outbreaks of humanity – this is not a film about supervillains - but also tends to be more brutal than she needs to be, and very much makes the impression of enjoying what Finbar has come to loathe (and probably always treated more as a duty than a pleasure). Condon is really rather wonderful in the role, selling the transition between whatever the Irish female version of a Good Old Boy is to someone who’d cut your throat without a second thought and like it, while also keeping Doireann human and likeable enough to make me a little uncomfortable for wanting to like her.

The Secrets of Emily Blair (2016)

Full disclosure: I still have no idea what those secrets are supposed to be.

Just shortly before nurse Emily Blair (Ellen Hollman) and her loving boyfriend William Regan (Will Kemp) – characters named Blair and Regan in a possession movie, oh yes – are eloping, a homeless patient blows a demon (in its contemporary standard form of digital black fog) down her throat.

Soon mild-mannered Emily “accidentally” cuts off parts of a little boy’s finger, holds mumbling discussions with someone or something invisible, tries to seduce a guy on her own elopement party, pukes on the table of William’s family priest Father Avital (Colm Meaney), and gets rather rowdier during sex than William appreciates (please insert your own bit about the inherent conservatism of possession horror and how it leads to really boring ideas of transgression here). The next step is of course getting bad teeth and starting on a little murder spree.

Father Avital, alas, isn’t a big believer in demons, so it takes some time before his thoughts turn from schizophrenia (as if such a thing exists in a horror movie) to possession. Trouble is, Avital’s not much of an exorcist, and writer Patricia Harrington – or whoever is responsible for that particular bit of the script - clearly doesn’t care how the Catholic Church operates, so the good Father seeks the help of a former rogue exorcist (Adrian Paul) for whose excommunication he is responsible. Hilarity, I mean excitement, ensues.

Oh dear, Joseph P. Genier’s exorcism horror film isn’t very good at all. It’s not only that Harrington’s script as it is filmed adds exactly nothing at all to one of the most tired horror sub-genres we have. The acting’s not terribly convincing either – Meaney at least vigorously chews the scenery but the rest of the ensemble is bland even when possessed and attacked by demons –, the production design suggests a bad TV movie (the church ruin set at the end actually made me feel sorry for the film for I have seen more convincing ones in microbudget films shot in backyards and empty warehouses), and Genier’s direction is lacking personality and drive.

Fortunately, The Secrets of Emily Blair might be a bad film, but it isn’t a boring one. There is quite a bit that’s amusing here, too bad the film isn’t meant to be a comedy. To wit: apparently, one of the main powers of demons is to drain telephone batteries; when you are possessed by a demon, you are trapped in a tiny forest set full of digital swirly bits that just happen to hide a bit of the cheapness of the costume of the demon who is punching you in the face repeatedly, which is one of the more wrong-headed attempts at visualising a spiritual struggle I’ve encountered; demons are easier exorcised when the possessed’s fiancée helps the praying priest out with a litany of treacly lovey-dovey crap that would be too embarrassing for most romcoms, suggesting that demons are allergic to kitsch. In general, Emily’s moments of social awkwardness caused by her possession are comedy gold.
Staying in the same ballpark of crappiness, the murders are all staged as awkwardly as possible, shot in ways that are bound to make the make-up effects look as bad as possible, but are generally worth a guffaw.


So hey, The Secrets of Emily Blair is badly made nonsense, but at least it’s entertaining badly made nonsense.

Three Films Make A Post: Quick on the Draw - And He Always 'Gets' His Man!

Soldiers of Fortune (2012): Despite a perfectly great idiotic action movie plot idea about rich people getting their kicks in a warzone, and an absurdly overqualified cast including Christian Slater, Sean Bean, Ving Rhames, Dominic Monaghan, James Cromwell and Colm Meaney, this is not the joyful return of Cannon-size action cinema dumbness. Instead, this is one of those action films that thinks it is a good idea to keep all its better action sequences for the final twenty minutes or so, instead trusting on bad characterisation and boring back and forth to keep its audience awake. Director Maxim Korostyshevsky does at least make the film look slick but he never really goes all out on the kind of crazy a film needs if it wants to sell Slater as a former special forces operative or Meaney as his evil nemesis. It’s all much too blandly realized for how stupid it is, making neither that part of its audience happy that might have gone in expecting a serious action film, nor those (like me) expecting entertaining crap.

The Bishop Murder Case (1930): The only Philo Vance adaptation starring Basil Rathbone (quite a few years before he became the iconic Holmes with the worst of all possible Watsons) falls into the difficult time period when most Hollywood filmmaking was still very much transitioning into sound film. Consequently, half of the actors involved mug like your worst idea of silent movie acting, others shout as if everyone around them were deaf, while only one third of the cast – thankfully including most of the major players – has already assumed the more workable idea of screenacting that would dominate screens for the next fifteen, twenty years. That’s a liveable enough quota, but unfortunately, directors David Burton and Nick Grinde fall into that early – and quite avoidable – talkie style of stiff, unimaginative visuals full of characters set up into stiff, unnatural tableaus, declaiming much of what they have to say visibly into the direction of the camera. The mystery at the film’s core is actually pretty okay if you like this sort of thing but thanks to the visual blandness and the general sluggishness of the affair, using the word “entertaining” to describe the film would be rather too much unless you are a much more patient soul than I am.

I’d say it might still be interesting for historical reasons, but then there are early talkies in the genre that are actually fun too watch, so why not watch one of them instead?

The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015): Robert Carlyle’s debut as a feature film director – he does take on the title role too – is rather fun if you like Douglas Lindsay’s source novel (and sequels), like our humour on the macabre side, or just want to hear people say all those dulcet sounding curses the Scottish are known and loved for. It also happens to be rather funny, showing off Emma Thompson and Carlyle himself in particularly good form. The film does a lot of clever stuff with the quotidian grotesque (Scottish gothic?) and uses stereotypes in a way that’s actually funny instead of lazy.