The 1986 comedy Eat the Peach has the kind of modest, unpredictable charm associated with the early films of the Scottish writer-director Bill Forsythe. Its unforced affection for its working class characters' oddball notions and offbeat tendencies also recalls such Jonathan Demme films as Melvin and Howard, which may have something to do with Demme's decision to lend his name as "presenter" of the finished film. It's set in a rural patch of Ireland so desolate and hungry that you wouldn't be surprised to notice Mad Max fighting punk bikers on the horizon. The hero, Vinnie (Stephen Brennan) and his affable sidekick and brother-in-law Arthur (Eamon Morrissey) are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, but they don't have any great enemies to battle, and after the local computer factory shuts down and the boss, having delivered a drunken tribute to the excellence of this beautiful land, returns to Japan, they don't even have day jobs. They repair to the bar, where they watch an Elvis Presley movie called Roustabout, in which the king rides his own hog around and around in a circular ramp called the Wall of Death. And soon the two men are busy slapping together a wooden version of the Wall of Death in Vinnie's backyard, while his small daughter looks in wonder and his wife Nora (Catherine Byrne) looks on in a kind of resigned despair. Soon they're taking on minor smuggling jobs to help subsidize the building of the wall; they tell themselves that when it's finished, there'll be a line of paying customers from all over, waiting to watch them ride it.
Peter Ormrod, who directed Eat the Peach, from a script that co-wrote with his producer, John Kelleher, based it on a true story that he just stumbled across; he was driving out in the middle of nowhere and damned if he didn't spot a Wall of Death out there. Having had the idea for the movie drop in his lap, he ran with it, and populated it with such characters as Boots (Niall Toibin), a big-talking promoter in J. R. Ewing regalia who tries to give the impression that he's been to America and learned the secrets of gasbag capitalism. But the movie, though whimsical, doesn't settle for being cute; it has something real to say about what it's like to be a man with leadership abilities and imagination who's trapped in an unwelcoming environment and has responsibilities he can barely meet. The movie's low-budget beauty and warm but aching humor give it links to contemporary Irish folklore. Ormrod himself had been working in television before making this movie, and after making it, he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth; it's the last thing on his IMDB page, where the "biography" section reads, in its entirety, "Used to be a pilot for now defunct Belgian airline Sabena where he served as captain before they shut down," though it doesn't say whether he did that before or after his fling as an auteur. Somebody should find out what the hell happened to the guy. Maybe there's a movie in it.