Workaholic Garda officer Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) takes a 2-week assignment on the small island of Erin while the town's sergeant is on vacation; she immediately runs across (and afoul of) fellow Garda Ciaran O'Shea (Richard Coyle), who both starts and ends his days with booze, a lot of it. Your typical drunken Irish cop, in fact. They are not destined to get along, but when bloodsucking aliens crash-land in the nearby ocean and start devouring the townspeople, Lisa and Ciaran have to work together to save the community. Teaming up with the English scientist, Dr. Adam Smith (Russell Tovey), and with Paddy Barrett (Lalor Roddy), one of the more sloshed senior citizens of the island, they make the stunning discovery that human blood, steeped in alcohol, is toxic to the bloodsucking creatures. A big storm is coming, and the Coast Guard can't come to the rescue; instead, it's up to our intrepid heroes to convince all the townsfolk that getting, and remaining, drunk for the whole night is a matter of life and death - literally.
One might bristle at the stereotype of the drunken Irishman (and woman), but when it's the Irish telling the stories on themselves, it's another matter altogether. This is a very funny movie, and even the bloodsucking creatures grabbing people and devouring them isn't gross, it's just kinda yucky. There were a few times when I jumped at an unexpected occurrence, which is always good in a monster movie, but there were a lot of times when I was laughing a lot too. Not to mention cheering from time to time....The leads are all terrific; I only know Tovey's work (from the excellent UK television series, "Being Human"), but I would make a point of looking out for more of Richard Coyle and Ruth Bradley, both of whom I liked a lot. My one quibble is that sometimes it was hard to understand what a character was saying, especially once they were all drunk as lords and slurring their words all over the place, but that's quite minor really, as the gist of the dialogue always came through. Definitely worth seeing, especially with a FantAsia crowd in Montreal!
