Irish screen debut scoops cult film festival gongs

An Irish director’s first foray onto the big screen has been awarded at a cult film festival in New York.

The comic horror movie Botched, filmed in Wicklow, the south of France and Moscow, won the best film award at the New York Horror Film Festival.

Directed by Kit Ryan the spoof thriller is set in Moscow and stars Stephen Dorff as a thief sent to Russia to steal a priceless antique.

Dorff and his psychotic Russian accomplices kill a woman during the robbery and are forced to take hostages when trapped by police on the unused 13th floor.

But it’s not the police they need worry about, since an unknown serial killer - a descendant of Ivan the Terrible – plans to go on a beheading spree.

Stephen Dorff also won the Best Actor Award at the festival.

A gore-fest with gags, Botched sees Dorff pull a hostage’s ear off, survive a stabbing, share a kiss under a pile of dead bodies, fight the killer and turn a rat into a makeshift bomb.

Botched also stars Jamie Forman, Jaime Murray, Geoff Bell and Irish actors Hugh O’Conor and Bronagh Gallagher and is to be released in February 2008 to cinemas in the UK and Ireland.