The hit rate in a comedy-horror is the often the scariest part of the movie. For every Shaun Of The Dead, you can expect to sit through a dozen or so Leslie Neilsen vehicles. Happily, Boy Eats Girl is a perfectly formed mutant. Borrowing vital organs from Mean Girls’ eye-scratching high school comedy, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things’ bizarre voodoo rituals and Evil Dead’s terrifically gruesome zombie holocaust, Boy Eats Girl triumphantly transplants the lot to Dublin’s more salubrious suburbs and gets wicked with a Massey Ferguson.
Between the gore and carnage, there’s puppy love. Seventeen year-old Nathan (the brooding David Leon) pines for Jessica (Samantha Mumba), the token virgin in a school of hellcats. When he spies her head bobbing about between another bloke’s legs, he assumes the worst and tops himself, only to be resurrected by his plainly barmy mother (O’Kane) in some creaky voodoo ritual. Several adolescent social gatherings later, it’s a full-scale zombie meltdown.
While we have previously been gifted with the splendid Leitrim-set zombie/hurling flick Dead Meat, Stephen Bradley’s splattering sophomore effort marks new Irish generic territory. There is, of course, something pleasingly novel, nay downright lifelike, about the spectacle of teenage undead doing their worst around Dublin 13. Where Boy Eats Girl really lunges at you however, is in the school corridors, rendered here as a merciless maze of Hibernian Heathers.
Between the sex brokering and the vicious sass, anyone would be happy to take their chances with the flesh-eaters.