Comedy horror – no surprise there, surely – Let the Wrong One In takes the vampire movie and does a Shaun of the Dead number on it. Which is to say: arcane lore is exposed to the withering light of everyday life. Result: funny, and another contender for the Ireland’s Comic Horror Hall of Fame, alongside the likes of Shrooms and Grabbers.
Conor McMahon gets his film going with lurid gothic titles and a bit of a Hammer horror parody. We’re in Transylvania where Sheila (Mary Murray) and her gal pals are on a hen weekend, getting drunk, carrying around giant inflatable penises and the like, when Mary is suddenly approached by a strange man in a dark alley and bitten.
Whoosh and we’re in Dublin some weeks later, where Sheila, now largely off-stage, has somehow got herself back home (flown?) and is turning people into vampires. People like Deco (Eoin Duffy), a druggie gobshite who we meet trying to wheedle his way back into the family home he’s been banned from. Eventually relenting, his loyal brother, Matt (Karl Rice), lets the wayward Deco in and has soon worked out that there’s something very wrong with him – the extreme reaction to daylight, his aversion to the garlic sauce on Matt’s leftover chips, the lack of reflection, the pointy teeth.
Deco isn’t the sharpest blade in the armoury and for a while McMahon, who writes and directs, gets in some good jokes about Deco’s failure to spot what’s happened to him – the smoking skin might be something to do with not getting enough Vitamin D, he suggests. Then moves on to Deco being incapable of taking the vampire thing seriously – “You don’t think I’ve got a bit of a lisp with these?” wonders Deco, pointing to his fangs.
What we need at this point, to keep the vague Dracula parallel alive, is a Van Helsing figure. McMahon has a bit of a casting coup here, since it’s Buffy’s Anthony Head playing Henry, the self-appointed vampire slayer, taxi driver and steam-train bore, who turns up at the house with stakes, Bible, bulbs of garlic, all the kit.
From here it’s largely a juggle of Deco trying to get his face into some blood, Henry trying to get a stake (he likes sandalwood, he says) into Deco’s heart, and Matt in the middle not entirely sure which way to go.
Later they’ll be joined by Matt and Deco’s ma (Hilda Fay), and Sheila will return to the fray, in time for a finale that hinges on competing loyalties and whether blood, fittingly, is thicker than water.
There’s really only one joke in this movie – vampire arcana crashing into the everyday sarcastic Irish working class – but it’s a good one and the two leads, Rice and Duffy, punch through as brothers who’ve gone in different directions in life, while Head slides in right beside them once he’s joined the party. With his ability to deliver a dry one-liner, he’s a real asset.
There’s no real money behind this movie but McMahon and DP Michael Lavelle do what they can with a mobile camera and some wonky expressionist angles (now and again). McMahon keeps things moving, keeps the pace up and drops in some little cutaway moments – including, bizarrely, a homage to Dana’s Eurovision Song Contest winner All Kinds of Everything and another to the Rocky training sequence – aware, surely, that setting most of his film in one house is a bit of an energy drain.
But he keeps the jokes coming and some of them are fresh, like the one about vampires having a wine-connoisseur’s palate for different types of blood – “1963 – a good year!” There are knowingly terrible jokes too, and a jokey use of fake blood (lots), and “oh god, no” moments where bunny rabbits are treated badly, fingers are lost in a moment of mayhem and an eyeball is suddenly left dangling on its optic nerve. All funny, depending on how this sort of thing grabs you.
McMahon has a liking for the dangly eyeball gag. He also used it in his 2012 movie Stitches, in which the comedian Ross Noble played a killer clown back from the dead to wreak havoc. It was very funny and badly overlooked – it’s worth seeking out. As is this.
Let the Wrong One In – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
