Boys from Coun­ty Hell

Rumour has it that Six Mile Hill, the small rur­al Irish town where Boys from Coun­ty Hell is set, gave Bram Stok­er the idea to write Drac­u­la. In Chris Baugh’s com­e­dy-hor­ror, the local leg­end of Abhar­tach, an ancient vam­pire buried in a field under a tall cairn of stones, is estab­lished as the pri­ma­ry source of inspi­ra­tion for the world’s most famous vampire.

Pro­tag­o­nist Eugene (Jack Rowan) and his mates spend their time in The Stok­er, a pub turned tourist attrac­tion where they stave off their bore­dom by scar­ing tourists with pranks and tales about Abhartach’s gravesite. When Eugene’s dad’s con­struc­tion com­pa­ny gets hired to demol­ish the cairn and make way for a high­way bypass, the crea­ture is released and the boys spend the rest of the film try­ing to get it back underground.

The open­ing scene is promis­ing enough: an elder­ly cou­ple sits in front of their tele­vi­sion set and is stunned when blood starts leak­ing out of their eyes and noses. The blood starts flow­ing in the direc­tion of the front door; someone’s try­ing to get in. They pan­ic. Cue flashback.

Baugh brings fresh ele­ments to vam­pire lore in an attempt to breathe new life into a stale genre. The way that human blood is drawn to Abha­tra­ch is orig­i­nal, but it’s not enough to sat­is­fy its poten­tial to be scary. Com­e­dy-hor­ror is gen­er­al­ly a dif­fi­cult genre to pull off. It’s the clever bal­ance of clas­sic scares and wit­ty satire that made Shaun of the Dead a cult clas­sic – but where Edgar Wright treats slack­er Shaun with great care, Eugene is an unlik­able lowlife who’s dif­fi­cult to root for.

On top of the char­ac­ters being bad­ly writ­ten, the film’s abrupt tonal shifts and struc­tur­al prob­lems squan­der its set­ting and premise. The film opens with the line ​“this is awful trash”, which almost feels like self-aware crit­i­cism. It’s not all ter­ri­ble: the sound­track is decent; the North­ern Irish coun­try­side is nice­ly cap­tured by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ryan Ker­naghan; and the spe­cial effects are well-exe­cut­ed. But this is cer­tain­ly an oppor­tu­ni­ty missed.