Panned Puffball to preview in Monaghan, The Northern Standard, Thursday August 9th, 2007

The Nicholas Roeg film Puffball, which was partially filmed in the Monaghan area last year, will be previewed in the Diamond Screen Complex in Monaghan Town on Thursday night next, August 16.

The preview attendence is being confined in the main to invited guests and those from the locality who participated in the film. A limited number of other tickets will be available from the Market House in Monaghan.

Prospective viewers are being asked to take note of the film's strong adult content. Based on a novel by Fay Weldon, Puffball is a supernatural thriller which embraces themes that will be familiar to those who have seen the earlier film of its director, such as Performance, Don't Look Now and Bad Timing, and includes similarily frank depcitions of sexual activity and violence.
Initial critical reaction to the fillm has been extremely negative, and it has not yet been assigned an official release date in either the Uk or the United States.

"...the worst kind of unadulterated nonsense I have seen for a long time..." is one of the choicer comments from a review submitted to the IMDb internet movie database. It adds: "It's a complete mess of a film, highly insulting tp its audience's intelligence..."

A Romanian contributor to the same site, who says they have seen Puffball at the Transylvania Film Festival, is kinder:"It strongly relays on Don't Look Know's and Straw Dog's flavors (intellectual young couple in a new, strange place), but with more psychedelic and sometimes thriller elements. And it's got a really hot sex scene in it. It's old paced and sometimes quite nostalgic, but it's a treat for the eyes."

The professional cinema critics who have viewed Puffball at festival screenings such as that it received at the Galway Film Fleadh have tended towards the unkinder assessment above, an a "So bad it's good!" reputation is already building for the film.

It should be bourne in mind, however, that Nicholas Roeg is a very highly regarded director whose earlier films were often critically disapraged on their initial release only to attain elevated status in retrospect.

Notable for having its three leading roles played by women-Kelly Reilly, Miranda Richardson and the veteran British actress Rita Tushingham-Puffball tells the story of a couple building a home in an isolated rural location in the English countryside whose unborn child becomes the focus of superstition-fuelled enmity among the local community. The main role is taken by Donald Sutherland, reuniting with director Roeg to explore again the supernatural territory they entered in Don't Look Now.

Local actor Pat Deery plays the prominent role of Dr Holmes, while Declan Reynolds is cast in the supporting role of an estate agent. A substantial number of people from the local community feature in the general cast of the film.

Next Thursday's preview takes place at 8.30pm.