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.

Ain't They Cute?

Film: Cooties
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

The lesson that I need to constantly relearn in attacking lists of movies is that when I watch something that might show up on a list, I need to review it. I’ve seen Cooties before, but never actually reviewed it, and suddenly it’s shown up on the TSZDT list of zombie films and here we are. I didn’t hate this movie the first time I watched it, but I also didn’t love it, so I figured knocking it out as soon as I could would be a good idea. I don’t like things hanging over my head in the way that I’ll eventually have to rewatch We Need to Talk About Kevin currently is.

With any zombie movie, you either have to do things as perfectly as you can (see: Train to Busan) or do something really different with the subgenre. The X-factor in Cooties is that our zombie plague is only going to affect children. Anyone who has gone through puberty is going to get some flu-like symptoms, but the kids are going to go feral, infect each other, and straight up murder adults and eat them. They are zombies, after all.

A Product of Its Time

Film: King of the Zombies
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

One of the issues with a lot of older movies is that the racism is baked in. With King of the Zombies, the racism isn’t merely baked into the narrative but central to the way the film works. A huge amount of the plot turns on the conventions of Black characters being cowardly and superstitious. It makes this film a difficult watch at times, especially when contrasted with a far more respectful film like I Walked with a Zombie, which came out a couple of years later.

Since this is almost three decades before the seminal George Romero film, you should assume that the zombies in the title are the classical ones, reanimated corpses designed to be servants, created through a magic ritual associated with Voodoo or something similar. What that means is that all of the Black characters in the film are going to be connected to these dark forces in some way, have superstitious beliefs in “haints” and magic potions…and at least some of it is going to be right. Someone much more knowledgeable than I can get into the colonization narrative that is impossible to avoid here; I’m not sure I’m the right guy to do more than point out that it not only exists in the film but is also central to it.

Meat Puppets

Film: Stopmotion
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

One of the more interesting stories, at least potentially, that crops up now and then is about the connection between art and artist. The idea of creation as a sort of insanity is a common theme, and it’s one that is easily understood by anyone who has tried to create anything more complicated than a cheeseburger. In this case, as the name Stopmotion suggest, the act of creation here will be a stop motion film that will more and more blur the lines between sanity and insanity.

Before we get too far in terms of the narrative of Stopmotion, we do need to talk about the actual animation of the film. Most of the film is not animated, but because of what is being created, a great deal of it will consist of stop motion work. Opinions on the film have been varied and run the gamut, but the actual animation is top notch, as good as you’ll find anywhere. If you are at all interested in this kind of animation and don’t mind some upsetting gore, this is a film you will want to watch at least for the way in which the story is told.

What I've Caught Up With June 2025 Part 2

On the television front, I knocked out a few bigger shows. I finished Detroiters—not a long show, but one filled with cringe, so sometimes difficult to get through. I caught up on the latest season of Doctor Who, and also finished Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, including the final movie. I’ve also finished a full watch of the original Star Trek series, a couple of episodes at a time on Saturdays. The biggest show I completed, though was The West Wing—I found the final season a slog to get through, but I did finally get through it.

What I've Caught Up With, June 2025 Part 1

I didn’t knock a lot of movies off the giant list in June (although I did finally get the number down to three digits, at least temporarily). For whatever reason, the movies I did watch, almost to a film, had long names, forcing me to break this up into two posts. On the personal front, I’ve gotten through all of the scanning of my mother’s photographs and slides. Now I have all of the scrapbooks. It never ends.

Trust is Hard to Come By

Film: Black Bag
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

As I spend time catching up on several decades of television, I’ve come to realize that I really like a good legal drama. I’m not necessarily keen for cop shows, but give me a bunch of people in a courtroom (aside from the show Suits—I hated Suits), and I’m usually happy to keep watching. This is interesting to me because if you asked me what kind of shows I like, I probably wouldn’t list legal dramas. When it comes to movies, I am much the same way with espionage thrillers. I can’t say it’s a genre/subgenre that I think about a lot, but I’m always really happy to watch a good spy drama. This is relevant, because Black Bag from earlier this year is a very good spy drama.

The key to a good espionage story is essentially the same as a good thriller in general. We have to have multiple possible outcomes. We have to never really be sure of who we can or should trust. Every decision our main character makes needs to feel as if it is potentially lethal, either for themselves or for someone else. Black Bag gives us this with the added drama of the espionage taking place in the context of a marriage and several other relationships.

Stay Calm

Film: Rammbock (Rammbock: Berlin Undead; Siege of the Dead)
Format: Online video on Fire!

It does often feel like the zombie subgenre of horror films is played out, and then you run across something that does a couple of things different. Such a case is that of Rammbock, also known as Rammbock: Berlin Undead, and sometimes as Siege of the Dead. I was unable to watch this in the best of circumstances—I could only find a dubbed version online, and I would imagine that it being fully in its native German would only help it. Rammbock (which translates to “battering ram”) has its issues, but it’s pretty solid for what it is.

The basics of the zombie film were set in place with Romero’s film in 1968. Zombies, more technically ghouls, are the recently dead returned to unlife, mindless and craving the flesh of the living. Anyone bitten will turn into a zombie, since the virus/bacteria/whatever that creates the zombies in the first place is guaranteed to be eventually fatal. This is a reality that is included in zombie-adjacent films like 28 Days Later, where the “zombies” aren’t actually undead, but are otherwise the same as the standard cinematic zombie.