Winner of a “best actress” IFTA (the Irish equivalent of a BAFTA) for Ruth Bradley, Grabbers’ leading lady.
Winner of “best film” audience awards at five international film festivals:
- Strasbourg Fantastic Film, France
- Neuchâtel Fantastic Film, Switzerland
- Trieste Science + Fiction, Italy
- Razor Reel Fantastic Film, Bruges
- La Samain Du Cinema Fantastique, Nice
“A romantic but surprisingly scary monster movie that feels like a lost Amblin flick, shaken and stirred with a dash of The Guard… The surprise is just how beautifully Wright’s film works…
The film deserves to find an audience both here and overseas. Like Gareth Evans’ The Raid, it’s not only a finely crafted tribute to a long-lost style of filmmaking but it stands up in its own right too.”
— Damon Wise, Empire Magazine
“Grabbers shows that it is still possible to make an inventive, exciting, entertaining invasion-from-outer-space picture on reasonable resources… It delivers proper excitement and awe as the alien invaders are seen off.”
— Kim Newman, Screen Daily
“Strangely, the first thing that strikes you about the film is not how scary it is (though there are jumps throughout), nor how funny it is (I’m sorry: hilarious), but just how beautiful Wright’s film actually looks… This gloss adds impressively to the production values, giving the film an assured and cinematic quality that was perhaps beyond its means – you’d certainly never guess that it was shot during one of the harshest winters the area has ever seen.”
— Steven Neish, Hey U Guys
“Jon Wright’s very enjoyable Grabbers has an atmosphere all its own: the humour is earthy without being patronising; the action sequences are both absurd and properly exciting… A very respectable entertainment that makes enormously crafty use of its small budget.”
— Donald Clarke, Irish Times
“Grabbers is a hugely enjoyable creature feature with a superb script, great special effects, likeable characters and a pair of terrific comic performances from Richard Coyle and Ruth Bradley (so good, in fact, that they deserve a spin-off TV series). Highly recommended.”
— Matthew Turner, View London
“My favourite film of the summer so far does not have a caped crusader as the hero but two intrepid Garda officers… Many movies will arrive in our cinemas with greater fanfare but very few will be more fun than Grabbers…
Topping the list of great movie drunks is the rubbered Ruth Bradley whose legless performance as teetotal Garda Nolan, getting drunk as a skunk, is paralytic perfection… Director Jon Wright evokes the very best monster movies including Jaws, Gremlins and An American Werewolf In London.”
— Brian Henry Martin, Ulster TV News
“Grabbers is a fantastic film. Almost non-stop laugh out loud funny, scary and tense when it needs to be, with special effects that would not look out of place in a film with ten times the budget.”
— Martin Unsworth, Starburst Magazine
“Horror-comedies are notoriously difficult to get right; in the effort to be both funny and scary they often fail to be either. Grabbers succeeds by getting the tone just right; it aims to be a comedy film with monsters not a horror film with gags. The recent high water mark for horror-comedies is Shaun of the Dead and it’s no exaggeration to say that Grabbers is just as entertaining and involving as that modern classic.”
— Adam Pidgeon, Movie Muser
“Grabbers plays its gleefully silly premise poker-straight, and could teach self-reflexive Hollywood projects such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter a thing or six about irony. The winkingly grandiose score is a grand fit with the glossy, not gritty, cinematography.”
— Robbie Collin, The Telegraph
“As a piece of entertainment, it’s just about faultless. It seems like a weird thing to say about a horror movie, but this is a film to cherish. We defy you not to fall at least a little bit in love with it.”
— Sarah Dobbs, Den Of Geek
