Boys of County Hell

The hair-raising but howling Irish horror chiller “Boys of County Hell” (***1/2 OUT OF **** ) does for vampire pictures what Edgar Wright’s “Shaun of the Dead” (2004) did for gutmunching zombie comedies. Humor and horror splatter each other in this avant-garde fright fest about a road crew that clashes with a centuries old vampire who reportedly inspired Irish author Bram Stoker to pen his legendary 1897 novel “Dracula.” “Boys of County Hell” takes place in contemporary Ireland. The best genre movies always raise the ante, and writer & director Chris Baugh has conjured up a vampire like none you’ve seen before. The notorious vampire awakened by a road construction crew is one of a kind. This ghastly, emaciated cadaver prowls around in his birthday suit. Baugh doesn’t parade him before our eyes until the big finale. A married couple are complaining about television fare in their living room. Mysteriously, they start streaming blood from their respective facial orifices. Like a runaway scarlet vine, their hemoglobin flows out of their living room, their house, and into the streets! Abhartach need not sink his fangs into your flesh because he can drain you dry from afar. All he must do is get within your general vicinity and activate his equivalent of vampire Wi-fi. Literally, this showstopping scene heralds the arrival of supreme evil. Indeed, “Boys of County Hell” sets a whole new standard for vampire movies, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome with its 88-minute runtime.

Basically, horror has two kinds of protagonists. First, you have the pros, like Dr. Van Helsing in “Dracula,” who know the strengths and weaknesses of the monster and follow a procedure to kill them. Second, you have amateurs who learn by trial and error if the monster doesn’t munch them. “Boys of County Hell” are suicidal amateurs. A charismatic group of Irish men and women whose numbers dwindle as they Abhartach whittles them down. Several nice characters perish as this supernatural nemesis plunders the tiny town of Six Mile High, all because a contractor tears down his cairn to build a bypass around it. The village boasts a tavern named after Bram Stoker called The Stoker. According to hearsay, Stoker stopped during his journey and learned about Abhartach. As early as 1870, Patrick Weston Joyce wrote about Abhartach in his book The Origin and History of Irish Names of Place. Recent literary vampire scholars have argued Stoker’s source of inspiration for Dracula wasn’t Vlad III, the Prince of Walachia, who loved to impale his victims. Instead, in 1998, Professor Elizabeth Miller found nothing in Stoker’s Dracula research papers that the author knew anything about Vlad III’S sadism. Instead, Celtic History and Folklore lecturer Bob Curran has asserted Stoker used Abhartach as his inspiration for Dracula. This contradicts the popular claim Radu Florescu and Raymond Mcnally set forth in their 1972 bestseller In Search of Dracula that Vlad III and Count Dracula were identical.

Writer & director Chris Baugh buries his revisionist fangs deeply into the vampire mythology. Specifically, he refuses to weaponize sunlight as part of his arsenal against bloodsucker as German filmmaker F.W. Murnau did in his landmark classic “Nosferatu” (1922). Furthermore, “Boys of County Hell” ridicules the efficacy of stakes plunged into a vampire’s heart. Baugh parlays laughs out of the contentious father and son relationship between Francie Moffat (Nigel O’neill of “Bad Day for the Cut”) and Eugene (Jack Rowan of “Trendy”). The friendly trio of Eugene, his best friend William Bogue (Fra Fee of “Les Misérables”), and a bartender Claire (Louisa Harland of “Derry Girls”) adds some allure. Ultimately, our heroic road crew learn through trial and error how to vanquish the blasphemous Abhartach. Initially, they must demolish the cairn that honors the vampire’s burial site. Mind you, this cairn served as the chief reason tourist flocked to Six Mile High. Later, Eugene and William stagger drunkenly out into the moonlight and quarrel about Claire. Eugene clobbers William and his pal lands on Abhartach’s cairn. The jagged rocks draw blood. Suddenly, out of the nowhere, a wild bull plows into William and gores him to death. Occasional episodes of horror, like this example, punctuate what is largely a comedy of errors. After he pulls William off the cairn, Eugene watches the cairn leech William’s blood. Afterward, Eugene bulldozes it! Imagine Eugene’s surprise the next day when he returns to find the cairn restored in