Lawless Ireland (series review)

Shot over the course of a year the show was presented by journalist brain O’Donovan, known for his reporting on the Rachel O’Reilly murder trial Brian began his career in cork working on Red FM - he also presented Undercover Ireland: the drugs trade a TV3 documentary which exposed the truth behind Irelands growing dug problem.

Lawless Ireland was shown in 5 parts which the first part of the series concentrating on the trend of binge drinking & drunken disorderly behaviour.. I cant say I found that episode too entertaining nor did I find the episode on young offenders & the like but where the series really hot the nail on the head was on international & domestic organised crime. For me anyways its always been a well known fact that ATM crime has been active in Ireland for years & it was no surprise that show claimed Romanian gangs were behind it. Many international crime gangs have been active in Ireland for years now but its not hard to forget our own home-grown gangsters & gangs. Its no secret that guns have become easy to get in Ireland & all it takes is taking to the right people so its no surprise that Irish gangs are more well equipped than the police. High powered rifles/submachine guns & hand guns such as the efficient German made Glock are being used more & more in gangland assassinations & in many cases the guns are thrown in with drug deals as sweeteners. Kidnappings / security transport robbery / use of bombs & explosives in gangland Ireland / extortion / joyriding / drug & human trafficking are all mentioned at one point of another even the rise of football hooliganism gets a mention - footage of rovers vs. bohs etc is shown. My problem with the series is that almost everything mentioned was nothing new to me so it makes me wonder who the series was aimed at - surely to people were not to up to date on the current level of crime in Ireland?. From Ross Kemps series on gangs to our own Paul Williams & his exceptional series of books & TV series “dirty money” I have pretty much seen every series on both domestic & international crime & organised crime so I suppose I should have expected the series to offer nothing that new. So after watching all 5 episodes I have to admit the level of reporting was very good but the way it was all squeezed into only 5 episodes was a little annoying.. Just as they mentioned a good or interesting topic they quickly moved onto the next. For the first few episodes all the camera phone footage was annoying & at times unbearable but that’s soon forgotten when news footage & interviews come into play. I can see why the series was made & with the current economic climate it serves as a warning as to how things are going but they really good have split the episodes up a little better & expanded on some of the issues such as the Dublin & Limerick gangland feuds - they are mentioned in the last episode but its nothing fantastic & it doesn’t exactly do justice to the fact that there is at least one gangland killing a week now. Its hard to tell if they will make a follow-up series but maybe that’s a good thing, it looks like they covered most of the issues but stitched it all together a little sloppily. I enjoyed the series & it was refreshing to see something more realistic & straight to the point by TV3 but when it comes to reporting crime in Ireland I’ll stick to reading & watching Paul Williams.

The Unborn (movie review)

I had been looking forward to this movie for a few months & at the time the buzz was pretty good, even the trailer looked promising but having watched it I have to say it really didn’t live up to the expectations at all. I think the main problem is that instead of taking a fresh approach to the horror genre it relied too much on “Ring” type scares with a dash of “The Exorcist” thrown in.. not that those films are bad to start with but I have seen those scares before & indeed so have many movie fans.

So the story goes like this:
Casey played by Odette yustman has a series of bad dreams which feature a dog with an upside down head (seriously) & a spooky looking ghost boy. As the story progresses we learnt that young casey is cursed & this particular curse reaches far back into her families history. It turns out that caseys mother committed suicide & her unborn brother is actually a Jewish demon (very omen like) this particular Jewish demon was born in Nazi Germany through a series of experiments & such, the demon can jump from one body to the next (like the movie Fallen) but it seems to stay most of the time in a creepy looking boy, purely for shock I bet. Apparently a gate has opened from one world to the next & in order to close it casey must undergo an exorcism (the exorcism scene has a few predictable scares) other than that the film didn’t contain enough good scares & the story was rather ..bad, at one point the demon uses the body of an old man to attack its victim & you might think the old man bent up like a spider is a fresh scare but no its been done before - in a deleted scene of the original exorcist the filmmakers had an identical scene with an identical spider walk gimmick.. Did the unborn guys see this & think no one would notice, either way it was too little too late. The acting is surprisingly good with a good performance from all the cast but the story falls apart too soon & scares just don’t live up to the hype, the chances are if you have seen the trailer then you have seen all the scary bits already. I really wanted to like this film but alas its below average & too predictable.