This is the strangest episode of Father Ted that I've ever seen. It seems to be some sort of prequel starring Donald Pleasance as a younger Father Jack, who is situated on an island in Greece. Jack isn't doing too good a job of stopping tourists he meets from being sacrificed by the local Minotaur cult run by Bishop Brennan (played by Peter Cushing). Jack so far has:
1) Let two tourists be sacrificed at the start of the film then gets ignored by the police.
2) Fails to warn three further youngsters, then just watches as they sneak off into the night.
3) Waits until one of those three people escapes capture, then after she gets captured he phones New York to get help from a young Father Ted!
Ted does actually seem to be played by Dermot Morgan, so that's good. He gets to Greece and Father Jack is whining about how the devil and the Minotaur are the same needs to be stopped but Ted is giving the glad eye to a young Mrs Doyle who is looking for one of her friends. It's around this time that we realise that just about everyone in the town is part of the Minotaur cult, but it takes Jack and Ted an awfully long time to figure this out, after:
4) They totally ignore the one villager who was going to tell them the whole deal. She gets murdered not long after.
5) Leaving Mrs Doyle alone while the Minotaur cultists play 'peek-a-boo' at her bedroom window.
6) Leaving Mrs Doyle alone so she can be captured by the cultists.
Periodically Peter Cushing turns up as the local Baron/Head Cultist so he can pulls faces at the two of them and say 'What's up bitches?" before getting into his Rolls Royce and driving off. Things come to a head during the ceremony to kill Mrs Doyle, but will good win against evil?
This is pretty dull, unengaging stuff from start to finish. I've heard there's a version with slightly more gore and nudity in it, but then the version I watched had the 'people exploding' bit at the end, but no nudity. It just needed a kick in the arse action wise from start to finish, as Jack and Ted mostly wander about retracing the steps of the people who were captured and glaring at the locals.
Brian Eno did the soundtrack, however. I do recognise one track from Music For Films, but the rest was new to me. Not bad.
You can avoid this one though.
