Not Grabboids, but Close

Film: Grabbers
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Comedies often play into stereotypes as a shortcut to a laugh. What this means is that if we’re going to have an Irish comedy (or horror/comedy in the case of Grabbers), there’s going to be a lot of drinking. In fact, drinking is going to be plot-central for this movie. It’s a film that simply doesn’t work unless the characters are boozed up. Despite the stereotype, it’s also a film that works in large part because of the fact that many of the characters are boozed up through the third act.

As the name of the film implies, Grabbers is also a creature feature. While I have a difficult relationship with horror comedies, I do love a good creature feature. When they’re taken seriously, you can get something like The Host, and when they’re more on the comedic side, you get something more akin to Tremors or Slither. Grabbers is much more on this side of things. This is definitely a monster movie, and it has some clear scares, but it’s also genuinely funny in places.

Like any good monster movie, we’re going to start with an attack where we don’t really see the creature in question. Since this takes place on a boat out in the ocean, there is a real feel of this being an homage to Jaws. Anyway, we see the crew of a fishing vessel picked off one by one, and then we move to the fictional Erin Island off the coast of Ireland where, in addition to the crew of the fishing boat being missing, a collection of dead whales wash up on the shore.

All of this soon becomes the purview of Ciarán O’Shea (Richard Coyle), the alcoholic cop on Erin Island and his new temporary partner, Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley), who has foregone her normal vacation to spend a couple of weeks policing the island, covering for a vacationing officer. She’s not in for an easy stay, though, because they’re soon going to learn that Erin Island is about to be besieged by creatures that are a mass of tentacles surrounding a central mouth. They are dubbed “grabbers” by the town drunk Paddy (Lalor Roddy), who inexplicably survives an attack by them. Smith, the local marine biologist (Russell Tovey) posits that Paddy survived because of his level of intoxication. The grabbers survive on blood, and the alcohol is essentially a poison for them.

What this means is that to survive the night, all of the townspeople are going to have to get ripping drunk to avoid being killed by the grabbers. The only person who is going to stay sober for the night, sort of the designated monster fighter, will be O’Shea, who is actually a functioning alcoholic, and he convinces Lisa to drink despite the fact that she’s never been drunk.

Grabbers works for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s genuinely funny and designed well as a story. Drunken Irish people might well be a stereotype, but the film makes it so that the characters have to lean into this as a part of the plot. We have to have a pub full of drunks because of the way the story works, and so, stereotype or not, it actually works for the story being told.

It also works because the creature design is fantastic. The grabbers are wildly sexually dimorphic, which makes this interesting, and actually plays into the plot. The females of the species are small, relatively speaking, about the size of a typical octopus, and survive by draining blood from their victims. The male is massive, a huge toothed disc surrounded by a massive gigantic tentacles. The males, when they attack something, generally eat everything but the head. So, when the people in the town are ready for a swarm of the females and instead encounter the huge male, things do not go as well as they planned.

The joy of Grabbers is that everything about it works really well. The characters act in realistic ways—it’s a film that is clearly driven by realistic character decisions rather than having their choices be dictated by plot. Of course this does take some license because the entire town is completely hammered in the third act. So, while the choices are often poor, it makes sense why those choices are made.

This is how creature features should be done. The monster is weird enough that the characters can’t figure it out right away, but it’s clearly something that can be fought against. The characters feel real and believable, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Why to watch Grabbers: Ireland enters the horror/comedy mashup world.
Why not to watch: If you don’t like the “drunk Irish” stereotype, you’ll have some issues here.