There are established ways of dealing with dangerous mutants and extra-terrestrials: infect them with the common cold (War of the Worlds); freeze them (The Blob); incinerate them with flame throwers (the universal cure as practised in Them!). This low-budget, knockabout Anglo-Irish horror comedy comes up with a new one when a meteor bearing creatures from outer space plunges into the sea off a small island west of Ireland. They definitely aren't coming in peace, as they demonstrate by turning a trawler into a version of the Marie Celeste.

A boozy cop, a female workaholic member of the Garda Síochána, a British marine ecologist and an alcoholic fisherman are drawn together as a disparate team to confront the alien invaders. Eventually they discover that these aliens exist by consuming blood and water and can only be combated by alcohol, an idea that will already have struck the audience as forcibly as if it had stumbled out of a saloon bar and staggered down the high street waving a shillelagh. So the whole village, including the jovial priest, is drawn into the local hostelry, The Hair of the Dog, and compelled to consume inordinate quantities of booze to resist the multi-tentacled monsters, which ingest their victims through a vagina dentata that is their central feature.