Grabbers (2012)

Nothing makes me happier than a good old monster movie and to tell the truth: there's been a bunch of excellent monsters movies during the last ten years, but nothing like Grabbers. What we have here is a mix between Tremors and... any random Irish countryside dramedy made, and boy... it worked out fine! A good horror-comedy takes the horror part seriously - like Tucker and Dale, Shaun of the Dead, Severance etc. That makes everything work so much better. There's not need to make the genre-part silly, that's just means that the filmmakers lacks respect for what they're trying make a movie from. Grabbers is a splendid example of taking that old "Tentacle-monster attacks small village"-storyline we've seen so many times and twist it a little bit extra, inject love and warmth, passion and comedy and produce an awesome monster-movie.

Something is coming down from space, crashes in the sea next to an Island of the Irish coast and quickly kills a couple of fishermen. The usual story of space-squids attacking earth. But instead of the silly US marines they meet resistance in the form of an alcoholic cop, a drunk old man, a young female city cop, the local marine biologist and of course the bartender! Because the monsters can't stand alcohol and the only way to survive is to get really fucking drunk! And I mean MEGA-fucking drunk! And that's what our heroes do, and the rest of the village... and the battle can begin!

It's actually a pretty thin story (...and come on, it's a monster movie!), but what it lacks in the basic storyline it gains in the fantastic gallery of well-written characters and witty exchanges of dialogue. I'm a weak person and I can't stop myself to love a movie who has tentacle monster attacking a character while he's scream "It's fucking my mouth!" over and over again. No, it's not a movie based on cheap jokes, it's based on honest jokes, on the absurdity of the situation. There's not one single bad actor in the whole movie, and especially Richard Coyle and Ruth Bradley brings so much love to their characters. Russell Tovey, who plays doctor Smith, also does one of the funniest drunken routines I've seen! There's some priceless situations here, especially when he's gonna try to light a flame thrower... but 'nuff said about that.

So what about the monsters? You have something to look forward to see! There's basically three different creatures here: a female, a male and the kids - and all of them, digital, looks stunning! They're both extremely bizarre, funny and a bit scary! The main monster, the final creature, is a huge motherf**ker that has to been seen to be believed. Maybe the finest tentacle monsters I've seen in a long time!

 There's not bad things to say about Grabbers actually. It's a high-quality, Irish, monster-comedy that takes its monster seriously without dumping the comedy into the sea. The audience at the Monsters of Film-festival in Stockholm laughed and laughed and I think the small details, like one of the characters taking a rolled-up newspapers as a weapon, brought down the biggest laughs.

That what sets Grabbers apart from, for example, many American comedies: you don't need big stuff to make the audience laugh - but it helps to add huge tentacles-monsters to the story! There's no reason not to see this film. See it in cinemas, festivals and get it when it's out on DVD and BD!