BAD DAY FOR THE CUT. (2017) DIRECTED BY CHRIS BAUGH. WRITTEN BY CHRIS BAUGH AND BRENDAN MULLIN. STARRING NIGEL O'NEILL, SUSAN LYNCH, STUART GRAHAM, DAVID PEARSE, JOSEF PAWLOWSKI, ANNA PROCHNIAK AND STELLA MCCUSKER. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
'Your Mammy is surrounded by silly men, pet.'
Frankie Pierce.
'You say the word 'kill' in front of my daughter again and I'll shoot you in both eyes.'
Frankie Pierce.
'I loved my daddy.'
Frankie Pierce.
Here's an interesting question for you. If you heard agonised screaming coming from the back of a van in an area of deserted woodland, what would you do? Would you leg it straightaway, thinking, f**k this shit, I'm not getting involved in this, whatever it is? Or would you try to intervene and help the injured party? There's probably no black-and-white answer to this question. It probably all depends on the individual circumstances.
I'm not going to tell you why I asked you that question, lol. Instead, I'm going to tell you about wee Donal, the central character in BAD DAY FOR THE CUT. (The title is based on an old agricultural saying or colloquialism, by the way. Something to do with when's a good time to do the harvesting and suchlike. It's probably obvious that I didn't grow up on a farm anyway, haha.)
Donal is a lovely man and a likeable character. He's middle-aged, strongly built and bearded and he looks like both the kind of man you could count on in a crisis and the kinda guy you'd go for a quiet pint with. He wears lovely thick woolly jumpers too, which would be grand and handy for the cold weather we're having here at the minute. I love nice sensible warm jumpers on men. You can't go wrong with them. And they make a guy look so solid and dependable...!
He's a farmer from Northern Ireland and he lives with his widowed mother Florence, whose advanced age and frailty is probably the reason that Donal hasn't gone off and gotten married or travelled the world. Florence tries to be independent but there are some things that happen to a body in old age that there's just no fighting against.
Donal comes into possession of a dilapidated old camper-van and immediately we think that he's gonna head off around the globe in it or open a mobile burger emporium like Colm Meaney and his pal whose name I forget in THE VAN. No such thing, though.
He dolls up the van, painting it bright red and everything, but before he can make up his mind what to do with his lovely new hippy freak-bus, he finds his beloved mother beaten to death on her own sitting-room floor. I bet you didn't see that one coming...
Donal, not unsurprisingly, wants revenge for this heinous and seemingly random act of violence. He wants to find the killers, or the person or people behind the killers. In the course of his, ah, inquiries, shall we call them, he meets a nice young Eastern European man whose sister is being held as a sex-slave against her will in a sleazy brothel masquerading as a Chinese takeaway. He also meets a nasty older man whose tongue can only be loosened by a tin of Heinz Beans. Oh, he loves his beans, this fella does...! You should just see how much he loves his beans.
The character I really want to talk about is Frankie Pierce. She's played by Susan Lynch, a stunning brunette from Northern Ireland who's actually looking better and better as the years go by. This here's the best I've ever seen her look. She's got a fabulous head of black hair on her and a luscious red mouth that probably makes men think naughty thoughts when they behold it, heh-heh-heh. She looked amazing playing a prostitute victim of Jack The Ripper's in the Johnny Depp version of the story, FROM HELL (2001).
It's her mellifluous Norn'Iron accent that gets me, though. I could listen to that accent for hours on end. It sounds really well coming out of Susan's character Frankie's mouth. Frankie is the kind of woman about whom it can safely be said that the female of the species is (sometimes) deadlier than the male.
Frankie is a bitch on wheels. She can handle herself just fine in a world ruled by men. She can handle a gun. She's no slouch with the iron either, and I don't mean in a domestic way. Think Little Mo and Trevor in EASTENDERS. She has a mouth on her like a f**kin' docker. Worse than a docker, lol, and that's pretty damned mucky.
She's a hard task-master (or should that be task-mistress?) to the men in her employ (By the way, gangsters who talk so softly you can hardly hear them are more vicious than the loud blustery ones and a gangster in a suit, especially if he also is softly-spoken, is usually the head gangster...!) and she's a good mother to her only daughter. She's got pain and suffering in her past, but now she's the one who dishes out the 'owies.'
Just what is the connection between Donal the farmer, his old Mum Florence and the mouthy, feisty Frankie Pierce? Why do two of the little trio find themselves alone together on a deserted beach one morning just before sun-up? And will two of them go home at the end of it all or will one, or will none? Watch the film to find out, gentle readers. It's well worth your time.
The film is extremely violent and, clichéd though it sounds, it's really not for the faint-hearted, as they say. Don't let the kids accidentally stick it in the machine, whatever you do, or you'll have to answer all sorts of awkward questions about why the lady with the black hair is ironing the man on the ground. Don't say you haven't been warned...!
BAD DAY FOR THE CUT is available to buy now on DVD from KALEIDOSCOPE HOME ENTERTAINMENT in conjunction with FETCH PUBLICITY.
It is also available now on digital (TVOD/EST/Sky Buy And Keep).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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