Let the Wrong One In – review

Director: Conor McMahon

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

Horror comedies are an odd thing, they might work but often do not and that can just be around sense of humour differences. My trepidation around this film was lowered because of director Conor McMahon’s previous horror comedy, Stitches, which I particularly enjoyed. McMahon was also the director of the (not comedic) vampire film From the Dark, which proved itself a fine inclusion in the vampire canon.

Let me tell you right now that I was not disappointed, this was a cracking little flick and it managed to endear itself to me right from the beginning.

the hens

The opening shot is a castle, lit up in the night. The film title, the soundtrack, the font when we are told it is Transylvania and the horse-drawn hearse that passes all screamed Hammer and managed to make me a tad nostalgic. Then it comes crashing into reality as a group of Irish hens come barrelling through the scene, one of the hens holding an inflatable phallus. Sheila (Mary Murray, Penny Dreadful) is getting hitched and the Dublin girls are in full flow.

fangs

They are being chased by a bouncer (Manuel Pombo) for failing to pay for their drinks and they split up. He corners Sheila, who makes a rather forward (last night of freedom) suggestion that causes him to back off. Another guy comes out of the shadows, reaching for her and then he bites her (the bite incredibly visceral). We cut to Dublin and see Matt (Karl Rice) on the way home with a tray of chips in garlic mayonnaise. On his walk home we get some playful moments with our expectations; a shadowy figure in an underpass soon becomes a drunk passer-by, and we get a shadow moment as he gets home that is innocent but reminiscent of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens.

Deco in the morning

Cut to the morning and Matt is having to cook breakfast for his Ma (Hilda Fay), meanwhile his brother, Deco (Eoin Duffy), wakes up outdoors, looking worse for wear with bite marks on his neck. As things proceed, we discover that Deco had a drug problem and has been kicked out of the house by Ma but, as he walks down the road towards his brother’s home, he tries to avoid sunlight as it begins to make him fry and the soundtrack plays the classic Violent Femmes' track Blister in the Sun. We are less than five minutes into the film and I’m already sold (and wondering why I can’t recall anyone using the Femmes' track in connection to a vampire movie before). The film just hits the right notes all the way through – for instance, when Deco and Matt discuss his condition there is no prevarication, Matt sees his reaction to sunlight, bite marks and dislike of the garlic mayonnaise on Matt's leftover chips and says vampire.

Henry - vampire killer

The basic story is Sheila was going to get married to taxi-driving train enthusiast Henry (Anthony Head, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) but on being turned into a vampire she turned the hens and they are back in Dublin preying on the population (we get a flashback to her attack on Deco), whilst Henry uses his taxi driver network to track them down. The vampires are setting up a new nightclub and intend to build an army to take over Dublin. Matt wants to help Deco but there is no turning back, and eventually the events of the day force them to the opening of the nightclub.

staked

The majority of the gags are based on and around the brothers and range from body humour to family observation. The former is seen, for instance, when Deco strains to turn into a bat and farts, but the body humour gags are not overused and so work. Vampires can, it turns out, turn into bats in this, they must be staked through the heart or burned/put in direct sunlight to kill (there is a partial beheading that does not work). We see a staked vampire dragged into the sunlight and start to smoke, quickly reduced to a skeleton. The vampires have no reflection and to turn someone the vampire must bite and not drain the victim; this happens with a rabbit and sets up a gag for a bat-winged rabbit later (the inclusion thereof understated). Vampires love AB -ve blood.

Deco and Matt

It is primarily Karl Rice and Eoin Duffy carrying the film but they are ably supported by the rest of the cast, especially Anthony Head. It was after the film that I realised that the female characters were pretty uniformly drawn as negative (if not actually villains), with Ma, for instance, drawn as less than a role model. That said the men aren’t drawn much better, with only Matt getting any sort of pass, and there is an element that Sheila’s bloody rampage is partly Henry’s fault (for thinking more about trains than her). However, this was after-film musing and the humour worked, for me, through the film and the characters were a big part of that. There is no shying from blood, and there is a lot on screen at times. I’m glad we have this one in the genre. 8 out of 10, remembering that the subjective nature of comedy means this one genuinely tickled me, your reaction may differ.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK