BANSHEE!!!

Directed by Colin Theys

When it comes to making a monster film, it must be tough thinking up new monsters to star in the show - there are already lots of movie vampires and werewolves out there, after all - but director/producer Colin Theys seems to have made a career out of uncovering and employing unusual creatures. To date, he has brought us trolls, a Sasquatch, and even a Jersey Devil. 2008's Banshee!!! - number of exclamation marks theirs, not mine - at least nominally plumbs the depths of Irish folklore.

The film opens in 1970, with a group of Connecticut stoners heading out for munchies. They encounter a mysterious woman - a woman who looks like the same femme they were just admiring on TV - who accepts their offer of a lift before turning the car into a bloodbath. Cue a jump to the present day and a group of mechanics retrieving aforementioned car from a swamp (evidently there's a slow pace of work in this neck of the woods!) They decide to leave the vehicle for a few days before towing it, but some ectoplasmic stuff seeps out and seems to have a life of its own…

Meanwhile, a group of obligatory twenty-somethings on the obligatory spring break are arriving in the obligatorily-remote surrounding woods for a camping trip. You know the type: all the guys are in hugely oversized sportswear and all the girls are in undersized versions of same! Some ludicrous platitudes on sex and relationships are duly shared between themselves before they set up camp, but in very little time they are being picked off by an attacking winged creature which has the added ability to cause hallucinations, impersonating other members of the party before striking. By seventeen minutes in, the film has managed two fairly impressively gory murders. However, the remaining twenty-somethings are soon calm and collected again, and, despite continued attacks, find their way to a nearby house. Here they meet up with two locals who have also been fighting the creature. Together they take shelter, try to understand what they're up against (with one of the girls helpfully explaining that sound waves could be causing the hallucinations) and make various abortive attempts to escape (including the attempted murder of the banshee by unconvincing guitar solo.)

And that's just about it. Neither truly a comedy nor really a horror, the film then coasts along towards its conclusion with very little in the way of additional plot exposition or characterisation - with a notable exception in the form of Uncle Jack (Kevin Shea) who can really act and it would be great to see him in other roles. You get the impression that the filmmakers had wanted to do more with the plot but ran into budget or time restraints, and that is a shame. The real relish the filmmakers show in this project, though, is for gore aplenty: although not a splatter film, there are several pretty gruesome kills and the team seem quite proud of their (actually pretty decent) effects. There's even a pretty tangential extra couple in the woods whose sole purpose seems to be to die in a spectacularly bloody fashion! The banshee connection itself though is fairly baffling. How an Irish ancestral spirit might come to be roaming the Connecticut woods in the form of a winged demon or indeed, the form of anyone else, is not explained: as mentioned above, the director has worked on a number of these types of projects but ultimately these films seem to be of the Something In The Woods style of horror and Banshee!!! suffers many of the generic problems associated with effects-heavy, narrative-light , low-budget cinema of this kind.

The audio and visuals on this release are passable; the sound is generally clear although some of the scenes are very dark and the visuals do have that 'TV'-style high red tone. With regards extras, there is a blooper reel and an outtakes reel which together constitute sixteen minutes-worth of rather questionable footage, and there is a commentary on the feature by the producer, writer, director and sound engineer. There are also some deleted scenes, including a proposed alternate ending which wasn't completed, and this again suggests that the money ran out before the ideas did. And then there are two trailers, one for the feature and one for the 'Assault of the Sasquatch' if you fancy more mythical killer beasties. Banshee!!! is available in Region 1 on Synthetic Cinema International , digitally mastered in 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio with English and even Spanish subtitles if you need 'em.

Review by Keri O'Shea