Poison Ivy (18) [Four Films By Katt Shea]
Tue 21 Oct 2025
6pm
€10.50
88 mins - United States 1992
Director: Katt Shea
Starring: Drew Barrymore, Sara Gilbert and Tom Skerritt
Sylvie Cooper (Sara Gilbert) is an awkward outsider who has a fraught relationship with her mother (Cheryl Ladd), who is remote, and father (Tom Skerritt), who is going through a mid-life crisis. She befriends a fellow teenager who calls herself ‘Ivy’ (Drew Barrymore) and these two loners become close. Soon, Ivy moves into Cooper’s home and becomes part of her family, but this young woman is manipulative and quickly wreaks havoc within the troubled Cooper household. POISON IVY is part coming-of-age drama and part wickedly dark thriller. It polarised viewers when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and sparked much debate. It’s a challenging film with contentious subject matter but also a thoughtful one with all the characters, even the villainous Ivy, being well-rounded and surprisingly sympathetic. The performances are uniformly excellent, with Gilbert and Barrymore being particularly impressive as the teenagers at the centre of the story.
“One of the most unusual and painful stories of young
female bonding of its era.” Mondo Digital
SHOOTING AT THE SPEED OF THOUGHT - FOUR FILMS BY KATT SHEA
In Peter Traver's Rolling Stone review of the Katt Shea film POISON IVY, he writes: “why settle for the usual walk around the exploitation block when Shea offers a wild ride with the top down into uncharted territory?”. This comment could easily be applied to all of the genre movies that the filmmaker helmed during the 80s and 90s. A pioneering female director who started out working on low budget productions for the king of the B's Roger Corman, Katt Shea made films in this male-dominated world with taut screenplays (which she often co-wrote), snappy dialogue, innovative visuals, thoughtful characterisations and great performances. With the Museum of Modern Art and the British Film Institute hosting retrospectives of her work, Shea has been recognised as a notable filmmaker and Triskel Arts Centre is delighted to present a selection of her films, some of them never before seen on a cinema screen in Ireland.
Katt Shea kindly took some time to talk to Triskel's Head of Cinema Chris O'Neill about her career and work. This interview will be appearing online soon (watch this space).
[F-Rated]
