The documentary ‘Fuck’ by Steve Anderson explores the use of the F-word in life and movies. The mother of all curse words is used 824 times in the movie easily outstripping high-user competitors like Summer Of Sam, Nil By Mouth and Casino.
The claim made in the Irish ‘comedy’ Holy Water is that ‘feck’ is originally a Gaelic word with a different meaning. An American cop fails to perceive the distinction making for the first time I’ve ever heard the word ‘motherfecker’.
I wasn’t counting how many times ‘feck’ and its derivatives were used but I’d guess it occurs well over a hundred times. It is an example of what I discovered is called a ‘minced oath’ and falls into the same category as ‘frigging’ which is popular in pre-watershed TV drama.
‘Feck’ is uniquely Irish and makes me think of the foul-mouthed Father Jack Hackett from the sublime comedy Father Ted who would frequently deliver unprompted interjections like ‘Feck!’ ‘Arse!’, ‘Drink!’ ‘Girls!‘ .
On a comedic scale Father Ted is a straight 10 while Holy Water would barely scrape a 2.
On paper it sounds promising. Four frustrated bachelor boys who are strapped for cash conceive a plot to steal a shipment load of Viagra and sell the drug in Amsterdam.
They hijack a truck dressed as nuns and road maintenance workers but are forced to ditch the stolen goods down a holy well when a crack squad of American cops are on their trail.
When Viagra contaminates the water supply of the sleepy village (Kilcoulin’s Leap) the effects of the ageing or semi-comatose community are predictable. It gives a new slant to the term ‘hardened criminals’. There is a raunchy three minute sequence of nudity and frenzied bonking which seems designed to make it easy to cut if/when censors want to make the film suitable for all ages.
Aside from this, screenwriter Michael O’Mahoney and director Tom Reeve rely on feeble innuendoes (“Make mine a stiff one”) or lame visual gags such as when a hunky black cop eyes up a woman and takes the cherry off an iced cake.
With references to The Italian Job, Reservoir Dogs and Ocean’s Eleven, the intention seems to be to make a low budget heist movie that emphasises ‘oirish’ charm and dry humour. It fails miserably. Peter Bradshaw, writing in the Guardian, summed it up well by describing the limp results as “fantastically depressing, unfunny and embarrassing”.
