The Michael Collins Septology

As has recently been confirmed by both Vanity Fair and Vanity Unfair, Hollywood has created a whole new subgenre of action movies, the Liam Neeson Threatens and Beats Up X in Y Movie. These marvellous masterpieces of mayhem are released roughly twice a year, to great acclaim. All follow, broadly, the same plot structure.

However, here at NDNI we can exclusively reveal that there is a proposed plan to take this one step further. Mr. Neeson plans to revisit his most famous and culturally significant character to date, Michael Collins, in a gritty reboot of established historical facts.

The following are the proposed plots for the first six sequels to 1996’s Michael Collins.

Michael Collins 2 : Revenge of the Big Fella

Michael Collins wakes up in the morgue, a hole in his head, a hole in his memory, a hole in his heart and a pain in his hole. He knows only one thing – Jonathan Rhys Meyers shot him, and must be hunted down and beaten into a greasy smear on the carpet.
Collins journeys through 1920s Ireland, laying the judicious smackdown on an assorted variety of Priests, Nuns, IRA men, British officers and curious farmers. Finally tracking down the man who shot him, he confronts Rhys-Meyers on the Cliffs of Moher, punching him so hard in the stomach that he vomits up the silver spoons from his gullet, then dropkicks him into the sea as “Shipping Up To Boston” strikes up in the background. He then looks down the camera, glowering “So, do youse want MORE?” then cut to black.
Featuring Peter Coonan as a young student priest and thief, Theodore Unctious, and Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill.

Michael Collins 3 : Three Legged Race.

Picking up immediately where the last movie ended, Collins dives into the sea and swims to New York. Landing on Ellis Island, he attempts to track down the love of his life, Kitty Kiernan, who has moved to New York and married Harry Boland’s previously unmentioned identical twin brother, Larry Boland (also played by Aidan Quinn).
Collins attempts to win her back, but gets quickly caught up in a racketeering and bootlegging gang run by a wizard in Hell’s Kitchen. Kiernan gets kidnapped, and Collins and Boland must put aside their differences and team up to save her from being sacrificed to the dark god Bel’ial. They succeed, but Collins is cursed with immortality, Highlander style, by the Wizard, played, naturally, by Ian McKellan. Boland and Kiernan reunite, and Collins wanders into the northern wastes, heartbroken but more powerful than ever before.

Michael Collins 4 : Churchill’s Dirty Work

Collins has returned to Ireland, but finds 1939 a volatile time in Europe. Having beaten up many Germans and Spaniards in the Spanish Civil War, fighting for “My own side- Mick Collins”, he is enlisted into the British Army and charged with bringing down the Nazi Occult Department by Churchill as “The Americans won’t even get here until 1943, so I don’t know why they can think that ponce in the spandex or the wanker with the whip can stop these evil blonde warlocks.”
Collins interrogates german rankers to find their magical bases, and then breaks in and single-handedly beats to death every German he lays eyes on, having confused the German language with Enochian, the angelic language of spells.

His overexuberant violence wins the war for the allies, but Collins himself is left personally devastated.

Featuring Timothy Spall reprising his role as Churchill, with Brad Pitt as the Nazi Warlock Heidegger and Katherine Heigl as the love interest, Busty Helga.

Michael Collins 4 : Rivers of Blood.

1967 – The Mekong Delta. Collins is sent on a one man mission to find the daughter of a Canadian general, who has left been kidnapped from a Red Cross station in order to pressure Canada into entering the war on the North Vietnamese side.

Collins is equipped with only a canoe, his mighty fists and his wits as he navigates snakes, French cannibals, drug-addled GIs and a succession of ever more brutal Vietnamese Prison Camp Commandants as he closes in on Dr Louise LaNee. He is also unable to use any firearms, as he is still nominally Commander in Chief of the Irish army, and Ireland is officially neutral in the conflict.
Eventually he finds Dr. LaNee in a mansion on an island in the Red River. She has been forced to marry her captor, Captain Thong Nguyen, and has been held long enough that she is suffering badly from Stockholm Syndrome. Collins, nevertheless, still has a job to do.
Featuring William Shatner as General LaNee, Olga Kurylenko as Louise LaNee and Hugh Grant in Yellowface as Thong Nguyen.
Special Extended Cut shows the controversial Liam Neeson punching a woman in the face scene.

Michael Collins 5 : Over There, Ya Thick!

Collins is getting some well needed RnR on Venice Beach in LA, determined to put the harrowing events of the Vietnam War behind him. After a heavy night on the sauce, he wakes up on the beach, without any trousers on and with the words “Get J2W” tattooed on his arm. Lifting his ursine frame up, he finds none other than Jimi Hendrix passed out underneath him – and Woodstock starts in 24 HOURS!
Collins must carry a comatose Hendrix across the city and get him on stage in time to play, or all hell will break loose. He’s assisted by a taxi driver played by Ellen DeGeneres who has to keep reminding him that this time punches and threats won’t get him anywhere.
Only Love can get this mission accomplished.
A surprising comedic break in an otherwise very dark series of movies.

Controversially featuring a blacked up Colin Farrell as Jimi Hendrix, Will Ferrell as Joni Mitchell and Danny Dyer, Vinnie Jones, Nicholas Lyndhurst and Quentin Tarantino as The Beatles.

Michael Collins 6 : The Rise of Ned Broy

Ned Broy, always a man to play both sides off against the middle, strikes a deal in Purgatory. He rises from the grave as a Zombie, and begins a wave of terror and destruction in 1980s London. Collins, living alone in a cabin in Alaska, returns to Europe to battle the hordes of the undead created by Broy, who blames Collins for his murder at the hands of the Black and Tans.
Every Collins Broy comes across is bitten and turned, along with anyone who owns a Collins English Dictionary. Collins must recruit a motley crew of survivors and battle his way to Buckingham Palace, where Broy has made his base. Only punching his head off can lift the curse and restore the normality of synth-driven cocaine capitalism.

Featuring Idris Elba as Winston, the angry black guy who dies first, Jennifer Lawrence as the teenage princess who dies second, Sasha Baron Cohen as the Ethnic Guy who Survives to show We’re Not Racist, Brendan Gleeson as the Evil Priest Using the Crisis for His Own Sadistic Ends and Emma Thompson as the Sexy Librarian who saves the day at the end.

Michael Collins 7 : The Man Who Won the War.

Collins has spent the previous twenty years rebuiliding an England destroyed by Broy’s Zombie Apocalypse. He is the King in all but name, as he refuses the crown because of a lingering republican sensibility and remaining deep-rooted hatred for the English.
Brooding out his windows and generally giving a nuanced performance of a man in complete conflict with himself, Neeson amazes as the Immortal King Mick, in a movie where he is almost never off screen.
Then, disaster strikes when the Stone of Scone is stolen by Irishmen, and Collins must journey back to Ireland, punching people all the way, in order to reclaim this symbol of Britishness.
However, it’s a trap and the DeValerians have lured him, once again, back to Beal na Blath.

How will Mick Survive this one?

Also there’ll be a combined BBC/HBO television series called Collins:Minister for General Mayhem, which takes place in the early months of 1918, before all of the brutality, and features Neeson and Aidan Quinn as a pair of pranksters causing mayhem for the British Government- sneaking into their houses and tying their shoelaces together, writing rude words on their files and turning off lights when they’re in the bathroom.

All the while they’re pursued by a detective of the Dublin Division, played by Sean McGinley, who’s harbouring a secret of his own – he’s in a clandestine BDSM relationship with a young IRB man named Tom Cullen!

Leaving Cert Student gets 9 A1s, Raging

John “John” Johnson, a famously average human in every way, received 9 A1s in his Leaving Certificate

examinations today. He has been described by family members and friends as “raging”.

 

Johnson, who lives in the middle of the road in an average-income area, has a younger sister and older

brother. He plays some standard sports with his friends, of which he has an unremarkable number. His

favourite ice-cream flavor is none of them, because he doesn’t really believe in favourites as a concept,

though he is partial to vanilla.

 

After an exhaustive year of 15 hour days studying, John began his Leaving Cert in June. Taking French,

English, History, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Geography, Irish and Biology, all at honours level, he

received the maximum grade of A1 and 100 CAO points, to a maximum of 600 points.

 

His teachers described him as “grand” “a nice lad” and “dull”. “Honestly? A bit thick. Not thick-thick, but

not bright. I’ll tell yis, he worked his bollix off for those marks,” said Paddy McHedge-O’Hurley, the Ass.

Deputy Principal and head of the Irish (and Soundness on The National Question) Department.

 

NDNI headed over to St. Saint’s Local School in order to get Johnson’s take on the situation

himself. Fighting our way through the scrum of reporters taking pictures of the 5 prettiest girls in the

year jumping into the air, we tracked Johnson down to behind the bike shed, where we found John blue

and coughing on the ground.

 

Sorry, that should be ‘found him coughing a Johnny blue onto the ground.’ He looked around at us,

miserable and shrugged “What was the fucking point of all this? I spent all year studying. All year, every

day 15 hours of work. I only took Christmas Day off, and I was so tired I slept the whole day. Do you

know how many 18ths I went to this year? Hmm? None! Not a fucking one! And it was all for nothing!”

 

“Ah here now John,” says NDNI “It was hardly for nothing. You got 9 A1s, man. That’s the most

anyone in the country got. You should be really proud. I know your teachers and school are-”

 

“Well Whoopdi-fucking-do!” interrupted Johnson “I’ve made those shower of shites proud. What does

that get me? Seriously? Nothing. Nothing at all. Each one of my teachers gets a fat bonus because I get

an A1 and I get the pleasure of not having scored anyone all year. I get the honour of being known as a

nerdbag. They lied to me.”

 

“They told me the Leaving Cert was important. They told me I owed it to myself to get the most points

I could. Well, why? I mean, they never even told me they only took my best six. I thought I was getting

900 points! If I’d known they were only gonna mark the best 6 I would’ve stopped after Maths and gone

on the piss. Except I can’t go on the piss, because all my mates booked their holidays when I was locked

up studying and now I’m left at home with elderly relatives calling me a “great chap” but not exactly

ponying up with the cash.”

 

The Spanner tried to edge away at this point but Johnson grabbed us, vicelike, and stared deeply into

our eyes. His haunted, yellowy orbs burned into our brain and his leaden voice etched itself onto our

soul as he said “Do you know the worst part? The very worst part? I didn’t even get my course. I didn’t

do a business subject and keep my options open…”

Elderly Gang terrorizes neighbourhood

The current economic reality has had many surprising results, from lines miles long outside bakeries for bread to TDs shaking down schoolchildren for their pocket money. By far the most surprising development, however, has been the emergence of gangs of OAPs, who have been running amok in suburbs throughout Ireland.

It is believed that these gangs emerged in response to current most popular crime (as voted by the inmates of Mountjoy and the readers of What Crime? Magazine) of extorting money from the vulnerable venerable.

Building from the foundations of Age Action, Alone, The VdeP and the fact that oldies tend to congregate together at Mass and Early Bird Specials, it was the next logical step that these organisations became formalised. Thus was founded the Galway Greys, The Oldcastle Old Balls and The Granny Bashers, a gang of grannies who dole out slaps, not a group in favour of violence against aged women.

NDNI has examined this phenomenon in detail in a town in that bit of the country that’s not quite Dublin, Wicklow or Kildare, (which is called Leixlip or Naas or something, right?). We’ll be totally honest, we forgot to write down the name of the town. It’s one of those standard Irish towns though, a Main St with a post office, pharmacy, seventeen pubs and eleven chippers, then various identikit roads radiating out, bleeding into fields and motorways.

The horde in question in this town, (which we’ll call Townsville for the craic, sure why not?) are seven octogenarians who spend most of their time hanging around outside the off licence shouting at things.

“Back in the day we was the terror of Townsville,” wheezed Biff, the undisputed leader until he dies “We was proper Teds. Greasers, like James Dean. Flick combs, flick knives, flick feckin’ everything. We had a look around the town then, and noticed the young lads was all palling around together, causing mischief… and we remembered how much we used to love that.”

“We’re all determinist rationalists and accept that we’ve limited days left on the planet, and nowhere save oblivion to go afters, so we figured ‘What the feck’ and restarted the old gang. Plus smashing glass is a serious buzz and everyone loves fire.”

The pensioner posse then said such hurtful and cutting things to The Spanner that we fled, in tears, to the car park behind Superquinn where the Young Lads gang was known to frequent, smoking hash and listening to dance music on stolen phones.

“They might look like a load of old useless bastards,” slurred Anto the Anto like a creaky door “but they’re handy as, pal. We’ve divided the town between the two of us and we don’t go near their manor. Never, pal. They’re fucking nuts!”

“Before, we got all the heads and went up to smack a few chops and show them who was boss. We expected them to run. They beat the absolute shite out of us. Seriously, Whacker still can’t walk right after that wheelchair ran him over, and Grubesy can’t hear because his ears are still full of Werther’s originals.”

“Ah yeah,” laughed Biff when we got enough (dutch) courage up to approach them later “ We beat the fuck out of those boys. They weren’t expecting us to be tough. They don’t realise that being old doesn’t mean you’re weak, it means you’re really good at not dying!”

“So once we’d sorted out the pecking order, we went back to having the craic Townsville’s expense. Hanging around the back of Mass smoking fags. Spiking the Baptismal font. Smashing all the windows in the Credit Union. Running that protection racket on the Bingo. Burning out all the Land Rovers on Main St, and pissing all over everything.”

“Though, fair enough, most of the pissing is involuntary.”

Fifty Shades of Ray

Avuncular TV personality Raymuel “Ray” D’Arcy has been all over the news again this week. For once it’s not because desperate nostalgiavores are trying to force him to re-present a TV programme we’re pretty sure ended years ago.

Rather, he has finally published his controversial autobiography, an erotic memoir which explicitly details all of his sexual encounters in and around RTE, entitled “Fifty Shades of Ray”.

The 300-odd page tome contains over seven thousand encounters, running the full gamut of human perversion from auto-erotic asphyxiation to zoophilia. There are also many cameos by famous faces from the RTE past and present, including a shocking appearance by Brian Dobson as a submissive, foot-fixated furry. You will never watch the news the same way again when you hear what he’s wearing under the desk.

“Basically it just seemed like a good time to cash in,” explained Mr D’Arcy, “What with the recession and all. To be totally honest, lads, the funds have been light ever since I got relegated to Radio, and I’ve no chance of getting back onto the after-school slot, since they replaced me with those two lovely birds in short shorts. Also the price of glue has gotten totally out of control!”

The story begins with D’Arcy’s first day at RTE, where he was lured to a back room by the bloke who controlled Bosco, gaffer-taped by him to the wall and “introduced to the pleasures of DeSade” while a gang of gofers gawped.

“Seriously man, who do you think the sickest fuck in RTE was?” laughed D’Arcy, while squirting the last of his tube of Xtra-Strong Superglue into a bag and huffing mightily “One of the rich, famous dudes with hot and cold running coked-up slags? Or the guy who spends his whole working day fisting a child clown in half?”

Point made, Ray waved his bag around aimlessly and started reeling off his favourite bits from his autobiography, unasked. “Tying up Anne Doyle and covering her in gravy was a definite highlight,” panted the diminutive Kildareman, “So was the time I took a bath in Rancheros with the two best looking Roses of Tralee, and one of the manky looking ones from Canada or wherever. Good times!”

It wasn’t all plain sailing; as our mate Ray went on to detail some of the humiliations he suffered during his torrid, submissive relationship with a cabal of Radio-ey guys lead by Ian Dempsey. He finally decided it was time to seek some sort of help after paying Sonia O’Sullivan four thousand euros to slap him around with her Olympic Silver medal while Larry Mullins from U2 played a drum solo on Minister for Health Leo Varadkar’s fat chops.

“That was only two weeks ago, too!” cackled Ray “So this book is up to date. Hey do you see those faces in the wall? Purple demons scourge my kindness, crackers…” he then trailed off into silence, clutching his bag.

The Spanner sought comment from his closest friends, Zig, Zag, Dustin and Socky, (all of whom were suspiciously absent from the book) but were told that we couldn’t speak to them because they are, apparently, “not real”, “puppets” and “what the fuck is wrong with you, mate, have you been on the bag with Ray D’Arcy all day or something?”

Fifty Shades of Ray will be released next week.

There are also reports that several other celebrities are releasing tell-all erotic memoirs, so we can soon expect to see:

Fifty Shades of Jay, by Jason Zed

Fifty Shades of Tray: In the Upright Position, by Anne Airhostess

Fifty Shades of Pray, by The Pope

Fifty Shades of Bray, by Brent Pope

Fifty Shades of Neigh, by A. Horse

and

Fifty Shades of Michael Bay, by A. Slow-Motion Doveflying