CineBad!!!

Guess what? for once, even though he gets his head chopped off early on in the film, Christopher Walken does not play a bad guy!! At least I don’t think he was all bad. He was kind of creepy and sinister, but not actually bad.

Nora (Elliott) is an alcoholic in poor health living with her young son and Jeff, her similarly alcoholic husband (Smith) in a big city in the USA. She used to be Irish, you can tell because she occasionally lapses into an Irishoid accent. The family doctor tells her that she has to stop drinking, or her health will continue to deteriorate. So, she decided to take the family to Ireland to begin her life of a teetotaler.

Nora’s grandmother and uncle live in Ireland still, in a big ancestral mansion complete with huge portraits on the walls and velvet drapey things around. (I won’t even go into the historical inaccuracy of all this right now). Nora lasts about 2 hours without a drink and subsequently crashes the car on the way to the mansion. The family meets Alice (a traditionally Irish name!), a little girl whom her uncle (Walken) has adopted. Alice is really a good actress! She was one of the highlights of this movie, but unfortunately I can’t remember what her real name was, and I can’t find it anywhere.

Nora’s Uncle takes Nora down to the basement to meet his mummy (that’s mummy as in dead person) soon after their arrival. She’s a “druid witch” who hurled herself into the sea after getting knocked up by some guy who didn’t love her. How he knows this, I’m not sure, since this whole incident took place over 2000 years ago, and she’s been buried in a bog all this time. I guess Nora’s Uncle was just a really good expert archaeologist. Too bad, because the mummy soon comes to life and saws Uncle’s head off with a scalpel.

Anyway, because the mummy is a “druid witch” she’s not completely dead. She’s slowly transferring her soul into Nora’s body. Nora has to die in order for her to complete the transformation. In the meantime, she’s assumed an appearance identical to Nora’s. This gets really confusing if you normally wear glasses, but lose them and watch this movie anyway, like I did.

People get knocked unconscious in just about every scene in this film. Poor Jeff! He gets knocked out in about 5 scenes in a row various people and objects! People also bleed a lot in this movie. There’s also a guy who is in the IRA, who doesn’t figure much into the plot. His main function is to occasionally bleed. We all know that all Irish guys between the ages of 14 and 40 are in the IRA, or drunks, or boxers, (or perhaps all 3) so I guess it’s only right to have one in this film.

All in all, this is one of the cheesiest new releases on Hollywood Video’s shelves. It’s perfect to pick on, yet I thoroughly enjoyed it too. There are Druid prophesies, haunted mansions, the mysterious grandmother kept prisoner… I didn’t really understand a lot of it, but that’s OK. Why were the shelves full of tranquilizers? I don’t really get it. Oh well. Be sure to wear your glasses for the last scene, though. There’s a whole lotta shape-shifting going on, and I was confused.