Perrier's Bounty (2009)

Perrier's Bounty is not the Irish Snatch (somebody, somewhere must have made this porno), but somehow I wish it was. What starts off as an off-beat, super-fast paced pseudo-gangster flick turns into a bloated, unfunny mess that makes absolutely no sense.


Cillian Murphy (one of our favourite actors here at Cinewise) plays Michael McCrea. He owes money to the local mob boss Darren Perrier (Brendan Gleeson, who gives his usual best) and unless he pays by midnight, two of his goons will break his bones. Desperate, he asks a loan-shark to help him out and gets involved in a break-in, which ends up a blackmail operation that will earn him more money than he owes. So far so good. However, when he misses the deadline at midnight the two goons show up at his door to break his bones. Michael's neighbour - freshly dumped by boyfriend, literally girl-next-door - kills one of them in the hallway. Now Michael not only owes money to Perrier, but he is also involved in the death of one of his men. With the help of his voluntary-insomniac father ('the Reaper' told him that next time he falls asleep he will die - cue Jim Broadbent munching on Nescafe straight from the jar) they bury the body up on a hill overlooking Dublin. In order to avenge his fallen man, Perrier puts a bounty on Michael's head, unbeknownst to the trio.

Retro Review: Red Eye (2005)

When Red Eye terrorized screens in the summer of 2005, it was both a return to form and a change of pace for director Wes Craven, a horror heavyweight younger audiences have never heard of (talk about scary, right?). Twenty years removed from his Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) heyday, and another decade from his previous Scream (1995)-fueled career revival, Red Eye was a straightforward thriller with very little blood and a scrawny, blue-eyed villain. Hell it was even engineered like a love story – boy meets girl, boy-woos-girl, boy…terrorizes girl?


There’s probably a gender-in-film essay in there somewhere, but let’s just cut to the knife-weilding chase – Red Eye is a clever concept that both embraces and rebels against horror movie clichés, and it’s clear just how much fun that was for Craven. That love-story twist, nailed perfectly in the film’s excellent trailer, is only the first deviation from the norm in Carl Ellsworth’s tight and self-aware script. Horrors and thrillers live for that 3rd act wow moment. Ellsworth puts it front and center, then leaves his cards face up the rest of the way. Red Eye, unlike its contemporaries, doesn't offer much mystery at all. But it is powered by the most basic horror element – survival...