Holy Water
Some suspicious blue tablets among the shrapnel...
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Friday, 05, Feb 2010 02:01
By Jez Sands.
Directed by Tom Reeve, starring John Lynch, Linda Hamilton, Cornelius Clark, Tommy 'Tiny' Lister and Cian Barry, running time 93 minutes, out February 5th
What's it all about?
People do all sorts of things when they're desperate. They lie, cheat and steal and apparently if they're a bunch of Irish no marks, they try to hijack shipments of erectile dysfunction medication.
Four bored and hopeless friends in rural "oirland" longing to escape the tedium of their dead-end jobs and quiet rural lives decide to make some money by stealing a truckload of Viagra and selling it on in the Netherlands. But their "harmless" crime caper goes awry when they unwittingly steal not the intended stock worth a few grand but $63 million worth of little blue pills.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer naturally wants its gear back and hire an American military company led by the stony faced Cory Williams (Linda Hamilton) and looming man-mountain Sixpac (Tiny Lister - a man who doesn't like he was born but constructed in a shipyard) to retrieve the missing merchandise.
The bungling foursome, in an attempt to hide the evidence push the entire consignment down the town's well, reasoning that no one would ever look there. But a split in the barrels leads the water supply to become contaminated and the town of Killcoulin's Leap to be a hotbed of activity.
So is it any good?
Unfortunately it's not funny in the slightest. It plays out like an extended sitcom - something mild and inoffensive you'd have on in the background on a Sunday afternoon while you ate lunch at your grandparents - something like Last of the Summer Wine or Keeping Up Appearances.
But it fails to even elicit that amount of gentle humour. The level of comedy we're dealing with here could probably amuse a room full of primary school children but then they'd laugh if you mentioned any puerile bodily function.
The most alarming thing about the movie is the presence of Hamilton who is the best and worst thing about Holy Water. A small budget Brit flick with a rubbish plot I could just about accept, but the presence of one of the most iconic heroines in movie history (that's Sarah Connor from Terminator and Terminator 2 for you Philistines) is especially difficult to swallow.
Her presence is unfortunately a cue to fire off some lame Terminator references and jokes which fall as flat as every other attempt at comedy in this utterly woeful eye-rolling travesty.
Holy Water doesn't even make narrative sense. Why does the drug make the female population of Killcoulin's Leap uncontrollably amorous? Not to mention that actually ingesting that much Viagra would probably give all the men folk heart attacks or at the very least priapism - both of which would be preferable to sitting through this again.
3/10