Boys from County Hell (2021)

directed by Chris Baugh

Ireland

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was looking forward to this for a long time because I just think the title is so funny. The director, Chris Baugh, previously made Bad Day For The Cut, a solid, non-vampire-related revenge movie that felt like an instant classic for the genre. But I am not talking about a revenge movie here, I'm talking about a good old-fashioned vampire film. And I do mean "old-fashioned": Nothing about this resembles the classic vampire tale you've come to know from pop culture, its roots are in something far deeper.

The attitude that the characters in Boys from County Hell take towards the legend that eventually becomes their problem is interesting. It avoids falling into the standard trap of having some old-timer come onto the scene and bestow their knowledge on the youngins, who ignore it and stumble into danger (it's certainly got the youngins stumbling into danger, but the knowledge is all in their heads already). We're introduced to the vampire legend through the main character and his buddies taking the piss at the expense of some Canadian tourists, and it's clear that even though they kind of laugh it off, they do know the ins and outs of it and at least have some regard for it, if not as a literal true story then at least for its place in local history. It's sort of this halfway point between belief and disbelief, like, yeah, they say there's a vampire buried under here, how silly is that? But also we give this place a wide berth for a reason.

The characters are what made this stand out for me personally, and I think maybe the writer/director having experience with giving people that kind of short but effective backstory that comes up often in revenge films helped a lot. No one monologues about their life or their dead relatives for too long, but they also say enough to make them feel like real people with real pasts, and that's a hard balance to find. I always reference The Room when I talk about this, how that one character just comes out with "By the way, I have breast cancer" right before she's killed, in an attempt to do the very barest minimum to make us feel bad for her so we'll be sadder when she dies. That's speedrunning character development, it's cheap and it's always super obvious. Boys from County Hell gives pretty much every one of its characters time to reveal an emotional wound or two but it doesn't pace it in such a way that it feels like they're quickly dispensing with the traumas so they can get on to the blood and guts.

Another great thing about this movie is that it has a serious knack for inventive gore. It's not just "let's stick a stake through this guy's heart, let's have this guy get his throat ripped out". There's a level of care taken here. The kills- and even things that don't kill people, just these really unique moments that make you stop and go "whoa!"- are things that somebody had to deliberately come up with. The cold open is what won me over, because it established not only that we were dealing with a non-traditional vampire in a brilliant way that I've never seen done before, but it also set the stage for those little moments of "how did they come up with that?" that were so good. One scene where a guy gets a pole to the chest and it literally rips his heart out through his back in one piece made my jaw drop. Yeah, it's unrealistic, but the way it looked. Iconic.

Also, speaking of the way things look: What a great vampire. No extra ornamentation, no ostentatiousness, just a guy who's been buried in the ground for god only knows how long. I got such a sense of malevolence from this creature because instead of having bells and whistles they took three of the most inherently terrifying things to humans and smashed them together: A dash of "person who wants to murder you", a smidge of "who can't die", and a heaped tablespoon of "and who looks like he's rotting".

All this and it's really funny too. I appreciate the emotional range of this movie so much because it is so funny. The characters go through such authentic-feeling grief at the death of like half their friend group, and the trouble of being youngish and still feeling cut up about the loss of a parent while also struggling to make something of your life- and then there's this stupid vampire, and you have to fight it with all your buddies and your da, and none of you know how to fight a vampire, and the whole town is gonna die but the vampire isn't like the ones in books and oh god, it doesn't even die when you chop its head off! The response to this is an absurd, frustrated humor that gives the movie a great tone. I could have given this four stars if it hadn't dragged a little bit in the middle- like a lot of movies do- but as it is, it's a whole lot of fun without ever feeling like a movie that's trying to goad you into having a good time.