You can count me among those short-sighted sods who’ve overlooked the obvious connection between Ireland and vampire lore, namely author Bram Stoker. He served as a theater manager and a drama critic for the Dublin Times, before he’d spun Dracula into existence.
Filmmaker Chris Baugh’s extremely entertaining The Boys From County Hell, takes place in a blighted Irish backwater called Six Mile Hill, where legend has it an ancient vampire named Abhartach lays buried beneath a cairn of stones in a nearby field.
At least that’s what bored locals Eugene Moffat (Jack Rowan) and William Hogue (Fra Free) tell the occasional tourist that comes to town looking for historical information about Bram Stoker. The lads insist that Abhartach was the original vampire that inspired Stoker to create his own version.
Coincidentally, Eugene’s no-nonsense father Francie (Nigel O’Neill) gets handed the contract to build a new road that’s going straight through Six Mile Hill and the accursed pile of rocks.
Eugene and his drinking buddies, SP McCauley (Michael Hough) and Claire McCann (Louisa Harland), are recruited by Francie to start breaking local ground. When they reach the rock pile, a bloody accident involving a runaway bull and Eugene’s friend William leads to the resurrection of a very pissed off, ancient vampire.
Rather than push his bloodsucker into the spotlight, Hough opts to keep Abhartach in the shadows; his mere malignant presence causes the townspeople to start bleeding uncontrollably.
Even with a monstrous creature on the loose, we can’t help admiring Francie and Eugene, a devoted father and son who can always find time to bust each other’s chops to welcome comic effect.
We’re also witness to some major mythology retooling, as it turns out you can’t kill a vampire with a wooden stake. Or decapitation. Or sunlight. This leads to an assortment of survival challenges for the principal players—and most of them simply don’t have what it takes.
What we have in Boys From County Hell is a bloody good time with funny, fleshed-out characters matching wits with an inhuman adversary that just won’t stay grounded.
Recommended to anyone in search of something fresh.
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