As Lance Daly's charming Kisses is released on DVD, there will inevitably be those who'll proclaim that Irish movies are at last capable of taking their place among the multiplexes of the Earth.

However, anyone who's kept an eye on the local industry for the past couple of decades knows that such talk smacks of foolishness, because in the same week that Kisses hits the shelves, an abomination like WC somehow manages to sneak out with its makers expecting sane people to part with good money to go see it.

It's always been this way. For every Garage, there's been sub-standard and pretentious schlock such as Alarm, which ticks most of the boxes of bad and cliched Irish movie-making. And what exactly are those cliches?

Well, if you're looking to secure funding from the Irish Film Board and hoping for a three-star review in the Irish Times, then you can't really go wrong with this little lot:

BAD LIGHTING

When you see Irish movies described as 'dark', it doesn't necessarily mean that the mood is grim (although more often than not that is the case), but that the lighting is so atrocious you'll think you're going blind. Cathal Black's Pigs and Pat Murphy's Anne Devlin are classic examples from the 1980s, but the feeling that someone has forgotten to remove the lens cap persists to this day. Recent offenders in this regard include The Tiger's Tail, Alarm, Anton, Speed Dating and many, many more.

MISERY

I appreciate the fact that nobody in their right mind would wish for a regular diet of Darby O'Gill and the Little People, but do Irish-set movies have to be so bloody depressing? Angela's Ashes, The Magdalene Sisters, Song for a Raggy Boy and their ilk are unquestionably serious movies, but they seem to have convinced a generation of movie-makers that the only way to be taken seriously is to lay on the misery with a very large trowel, failing to realise that it's not really a good idea to try to do Bergman in, say, Bray.

THE MIDLANDS

Mind you, if you are going for the misery market then why not go the whole hog and set your emotionally wrenching expose of the human condition in that flat, featureless wasteland to the west of Dublin. Places like Athlone and Longford already come complete with their own grey clouds and so make ideal locations for tales of despair, infidelity, domestic abuse and the sheer pointlessness of existence. Garage used this to its advantage while Eden, Guiltrip, Eat the Peach and Alarm most certainly did not.

HORSES

The obsession with horses can be traced back as far as Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx, in which Gene Wilder's character collects horse manure for a living and flogs it to the people of Dublin (and no, I don't reckon there was too much heavy symbolism intended there), and since then we've had equine involvement in The Commitments, Into the West and the strange use of the nag in Garage. What was that all about?

MESSAGES

Contemporary Irish cinema is cursed with "state of the nation" addresses. Perhaps the greatest offender in this regard is John Boorman's unintentionally hilarious The Tiger's Tail, in which the rich Englishman who lives in a mansion in Wicklow delivered a pompous sermon about how us Paddies had lost the run of ourselves during the boom times. Gerard Stembridge banged on about the same thing with even less subtlety in Alarm, while the upcoming Our Wonderful Home repeats the familiar riff.

BAD IRISH ACCENTS

In a recent online poll, Tom Cruise was deemed to have the worst Irish accent on celluloid for Far and Away but there are plenty of other examples. John Hurt didn't do himself any favours in The Field, Kevin Spacey and Linda Fiorentino were a disgrace in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Ordinary Decent Criminal, Vinnie Jones was positively comical in Strength and Honour as were the efforts of Gerard Butler and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in PS I Love You and Kim Cattrall in The Tiger's Tail. However, worst of all has to be Navan-born Pierce Brosnan's attempt at a Dublin brogue in Evelyn. Work that one out.

REALLY UNCONVINCING FIGHT SCENES

Victor McLaglen and John Wayne may have set the bar too high with their epic bout of fisticuffs in The Quiet Man, but the standard of scrapping in Irish films really is terrible. You'd be better off with CCTV footage from a chipper in Ballyfermot than what you'll see in The Commitments, The Tiger's Tail, The Courier, The Field, Alarm, WC and Speed Dating but -- trumpets please! -- yet again the winner is Pierce Brosnan for a truly woeful punch-up in Taffin.

GETTING DUBLIN REALLY WRONG

Adam and Paul, Kisses and 32A gave us a recognisable Dublin, but too many film-makers just can't seem to get a handle on the capital. The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van veered too close to Paddywhackery, Once gave us a city where only one person had a mobile phone, The Courier was just ridiculous, The Tiger's Tail was so off-beam it was almost comical, and in Alarm a trip on the Luas was made to resemble a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Mind you, with Shamrock Rovers now installed in Tallaght, that might not be too far off the mark.

- George Byrne