| Film and DVD Reviews FILM REVIEW
Pavee Lackeen
By Grainne McLoughlin
Perry Ogden’s directorial debut Pavee Lackeen is set to take audiences
on a journey of secrets. The courageous and sympathetic story of Irish Travellers
is told through the eyes of 10-year-old Winnie who lives with her mother
and siblings in a trailer on the side of the road in an abandoned part of
Dublin.
We see Winnie — a young Traveller girl in contemporary Ireland — get
suspended from school for fighting, confront the law and try to deal with
the stereotypes she and her family have had to live with their whole lives.
While the family waits for the council to find them a nice house in a
nice neighbourhood before they’re evicted from their caravan, the audience
are exposed to a reality — a reality which leaves Winnie and her family
often without running water, medicine or help of any sort.
Pavee Lackeen is a film that broaches on a documentary style following
Ogden’s experience charting the day-to-day lives of the young poor in Dublin
with his photo book Pony Kids.
This, his first feature, moves on from those representations, offering
an intimate portrait of the Traveller community.
Featuring a cast of mostly non-professional actors drawn from Travellers,
Pavee Lackeen is a real representation of the community and one that on
a day-to-day basis has to contend with both prejudice and poverty.
A promisingly distinctive debut.
Dir: Perry Ogden.
Out nationwide now.
Dead Meat
DVD REVIEW
By Phil Savva
A young couple — Helena and Martin (Marian Araujo and David Ryan) — are
driving along a country road in Co. Limerick when they run down and kill
a man in the road.
Guilt-ridden, they immediately load him into the back of their car and
head towards the nearest town and then the ungrateful corpse turns rounds
and bites Martin.
So begins the very first all-Irish horror film.
Dead Meat, written and directed by Conor McMahon, is a tongue-in-cheek
take on the zombie genre that never quite delivers but has its moments.
A strain of disease has (supposedly) wiped out all the cows in Ireland
after sending them mad and turning them against their owners.
As the aforementioned couple drive along they hear radio reports of strange
goings-on and then have their little accident.
As expected the guy who they run down is in fact a zombie and after being
bitten so is Martin.
However our heroine Helena saves the day by sucking his brains out with
a vacuum cleaner!
She meets up with another survivor Desmond (David Mallard) and together
they try to reach safety dodging all manner of zombies along the way.
As I said it has its moments but never quite fulfils its potential. And
even though it’s tongue-in-cheek it gets a little silly at times.
But that said it has to score points for some of the most original ways
of dispatching a zombie on film — vacuum cleaner, high-heels, hurley and
a sliothar!
Starring Marian Araujo, David Mallard, David Ryan and Eoin Whelan.
Dir: Conor McMahon.
On sale November 7.
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