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Wake Wood
| Released |
25 March 2011 |
| Director |
David Keating |
Starring
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Aidan Gillen, Eva Birthistle, Timothy Spall, Ella Connolly, Ruth McCabe, Brian Gleeson, Amelia Crowley, Dan Gordon |
Writer(s)
|
Brendan McCarthy, David Keating |
Producer(s)
|
Brendan McCarthy, John McDonnell |
| Origin |
Ireland, United Kingdom |
| Running Time |
92 minutes |
| Genre |
Horror |
| Rating |
18 |
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'Not Worth the Wait' Wood.
Despite numerous attempts to adapt the horror genre to the Emerald Isle, Irish Horror films probably don't have good associations for many. Generally, they take one of two directions, a contemporaneous spin emergent since the glut of self aware self referential horrors of the nineties (Check: Boy Eats Girl, Dead Meat, Isolation) or the slightly more esoteric turn of playing upon ideas of Ireland's backwardness, rurality or long forgotten paganism (Check: Rawhead Rex, Trance/The Eternal, Shrooms).
Mostly, they end up in straight-to-video limbo, avoid the truly spine tingling and instead verge on the ridiculous. Not that I'm really complaining. If I hadn't seen Isolation I wouldn't have been treated to the terror of a bovine genetics project gone wrong. And if I hadn't seen Trance/The Eternal I never would've seen Christopher Walken cameo in a film where a millennia old Druid Witch called Niamh decapitates someone with a levitating Joe Dolan record. And if I missed out on Rawhead Rex I wouldn't have had the perverse pleasure of seeing Colm Tóibín in a film with the immortal lines “Get up the stairs fuckface, God is waiting”, a Catholic priest's baptism in bodily fluid and barmy resolution by way of the yonic power of a Sheela na Gig. That being said none have really reached the premier leagues in horror terms and I probably don't have my priorities in any kind of order.
Wake Wood falls into the latter category of rural Irish mystical jiggery pokery and is the first full feature from the rejuvenated Hammer Horror Films company following a thirty year absence of production. And, it, of course, begs the questions; Was it worth the 30 year wait? And does Irish horror ever really work? Well, on the decapitations and otherwise gruesome death front, Wake Wood isn't too bad, and having unfortunately somehow becoming re-sensitized to movie violence some time after I originally became de-sensitized to it, I ended up covering my eyes quite a few times. But some promising moments at the film's beginning, much to do with old school editing choices that make it worthy and reminiscent of anything else from the Hammer Horror studios, don't last, and, eventually, any squeamishness I had turned to muffled laughter. What's more as the movie reached its finale I began to realise just how unpleasantly uneven the whole film is, one minute The Wicker Man's Summer Isle displaced to the West of Ireland, then a creepy ghost story by way of pagan resurrection cult and then a high camp b-movie complete with a series of ape shit murders.
On the whole, Wake Wood won't be repudiating people's dim view of the Irish horror movie, never hitting the peaks or troughs expected of truly awful horror movies or properly great ones, so that even if you're a fan of the bad end of the genre you won't think this is a must see and if you're expecting to have a truly scary experience you'll also leave the theatre feeling more than a mite dissatisfied.
Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle star as a couple who when their daughter is tragically killed move to a rural Irish village where all is not what it seems.
- Cormac O’Brien |
