New York Irish Center Screens Zany Comedy, Documentary on Highly Respected Priest

No spoonful of sugar is needed to make this medicine go down.

In the 2012 comedy Grabbers, the only way to survive attack by bloodsucking aliens is to get drunk — and stay that way. The setting is a remote island off the Irish coast where fishing is the only way of life. Ciarán O’Shea is a charming but heavy drinking police office who can’t stand his new partner, Lisa Nolan, a hard-working, straight-laced workaholic from the mainland who volunteered for this assignment in order to impress her superiors.

Fighting crime consists of dealing with an occasional drunk and killing time until an entire fishing boat crew disappears. Then dead, ravaged whales start washing up on shore and a lobsterman catches a bizarre-looking sea creature, which turns out to be a “grabber,” an extraterrestrial that survives on blood and water. After a local drunk survives a grabber attack, the two police officers realize that these predators are repulsed by blood with high alcohol content. Hilarity ensues.

The New York Irish Center will screen Grabbers and The Emigrant Chaplain, a 20-minute documentary by Radharc Films on Father Colm Campbell, a Belfast native who worked as a chaplain with the Diocese of Brooklyn and later led the Irish Apostolate USA. In 2003, Father Campbell founded the New York Irish Center and spearheaded the effort to buy the Long Island City property where the agency is currently based. He died last month.

Details: Grabbers and The Emigrant Chaplain, New York Irish Center, 10-40 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, July 18, 7:30 pm, $11 suggested donation/$8 for students, seniors, unemployed.

Photo by New York Irish Center