Plague Town (2008) Reviews

• Aspires to be average

  cookie6662009-05-26

  Plague Town caught my attention because I'm a sucker for horror flicks that have creepy children in it - to my mind they are the scariest kind. It started off good, with a few glitches though - some strange scenes that were apparently supposed to build up the tension, but failed at it. The relationship between the two sisters was exaggerated, I thought, and the whole family unit dysfunctional - even so much that I was wondering why on earth would they gone on this trip together. This being said, the children were creepy enough, although the effect didn't really last. The events in the cottage and with the townspeople were much more effective, while the children took the unwilling role of backscatter. I won't even start questioning the logic behind the plot - the so-called plague, isolation, unexplained murderous desires and whatnot - let's leave it at that and take the film for what it is. To sum up, it'll give you a few good scares with a few laughs, but not much more.

• Unnerving

  theeintolerablekidd2009-05-15

  I choose to watch this film while I was in a search for something scary after mistakenly reading that it has won an award at some "Horrorthon" festival. It hasn't won any awards and it most probably won't. It was just screened there, but I'm glad I watched it. It was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. A creepy and scary horror movie. For a low budget and an unknown cast this was a very good effort. The other reviewer is right to point out that that it is mis-titled, "Plague Town" does not accurately describe the film, but so what! (And just for the other reviewers benefit, I do not believe they are eating corned beef and cabbage sandwiched, I believe they are eating pasties) It has barely nothing for a storyline but then most horror films don't. A horror film is about setting the scene and then laying on the threat of what is going to happen next. An American family find themselves stranded in the middle of some Irish countryside near a village which they quickly discover, to their misfortune, is populated by demon children. It has hints of "Children of the Corn", a nudge towards "Rosemary's Baby", and I suspect an admiration for the Sadako character from the Japanese "Ring" films. I watched this movie alone, in my flat, with the lights off, and it was pretty unnerving in places. It's the first film that I've watched in a long time where I've come away feeling slightly nervous to walk around my own flat. I for sure do not want to get stranded in any Irish countryside after watching this.

• A little promise at the start, then it makes you regret wasting your time on it.

  MBunge2011-01-07

  Plague Town was either made by idiots or made for idiots. I'm leaning toward the "made for idiots" explanation because a lot of this production is quite competent for the low budget horror genre. A real creepiness is generated and pains were taken to give the main characters some believable and human interactions. Which makes it all the more frustrating, aggravating and disappointing that this movie repeatedly falls back on the absolute worst filmmaking characteristics of the horror genre. Over and over again, the people in Plague Town have to be dumber than lobotomized lab rats for the story to work and the audience has to be dumber than sterilized dirt not to notice how little sense everything makes. I can forgive a filmmaker for being a moron. I can't forgive these filmmakers for treating me and every other viewer like morons. This exercise in imbecility concerns an American family vacationing in Ireland. There's the thoroughly generic dad (David Lombard), his only slightly less generic fiancée (Lindsay Goranson), his bitchy blonde daughter (Erica Rhodes), his dark-haired daughter with a history of mental trouble (Josslyn DeCrosta) and an English bloke who hooked up with the bitchy blonde daughter a few days ago (James Warke). This little group gets off a bus in the middle of the Irish countryside, wanders around and bickers until they miss the bus back and are stranded for the night. That's when they're set upon by a band of marginally deformed children, which results in a lot of running, screaming and various forms of horror-movie violence. The first bit of Plague Town, when it's just the family and their British tag along, is perfectly okay. The actors all do a decent job and the story effectively establishes who these characters are and how their interact with each other. It's a nice example of how to get the audience to emotionally invest in the story and its characters before the crap hits the fan. When the running and the screaming starts, however, any viewer investment in this film is wiped out more quickly and completely than the worst stock market crash in history. Simply put, this thing is bang-your-head-against-the wall stupid. Horror movie characters are often more dull-witted than normal folk and I can let that sort of thing slide. Horror movie plots also usually don't stand up to a lot of critical analysis and I can let that sort of thing slide. I cannot let Plague Town slide. When the scary stuff starts, this film rapidly descends into a bottomless pit of asininity where the most fundamental elements of human behavior, logic and even causality are utterly ignored. Let me give you some examples of what I mean. There's a scene where a character is stabbed in the shoulder with a shard of glass. It's clearly a wound that's at least an inch or so deep, not a scratch that can be shrugged off. Yet after pulling out the shard, this character does NOT run away. Instead, he follows his attacker into a darkened room and you can guess how that turns out. In another scene, a character is lying on the road while three of the mutant children attack her. Even though the mutants are clearly smaller than their victim and aren't hitting her that hard, she makes absolutely no effort to get up, get away, defend herself or fight back. She just lies there on the road, for no explicable reason, and allows herself to be beaten. When some characters are trying to flee in a car, they get stopped on a bridge with the mutant children blocking the way forward. The mutants are at least 15 to 20 feet away from the car when one of them drags a chain that's attached to a tractor and hooks it underneath the car so it can't drive away. Doing something like that would take at least 30 seconds. Putting the car in reverse and stepping on the gas would take no more than 3 seconds, but the rules of time and space are suspended to allow the car to be trapped. That sort of doltish nonsense happens all the damn time in this movie. These filmmakers consistently take the audience's suspension of disbelief, eat it up, digest it, excrete it and then throw it against a Teflon wall where nothing sticks. I don't care how good you are at other aspects of storytelling, and Plague Town isn't exceptionally good at those things, when your characters have to behave like cretins who can barely feed themselves and the physical laws of the universe have to be disregarded in order to make your story work…YOUR STORY SUCKS ASS!!!!! If you know an idiot who likes horror flicks, give them this DVD for their birthday. Unless you are an idiot, though, don't even try and watch it yourself.

• Plague is correct

  aqos-12009-05-30

  This movie was plagued to be horrible after the first scene. The plot was very predictable. The "children" were very creepy looking. I would not want to run into them in a dark alley. They were the only thing interesting about this movie. If they had given an explanation of why these children were born as they were, it would have added a lot to the story. Also they should have made it clear as to whether or not what the children were doing was ritualistic to try to turn the town's luck around, or was it all just sport for them. The way the Englishman ended up seemed very ritualistic. My biggest question is how did the outlying towns not know about this little community? This was a waste of time to watch and could have been a better movie with very little effort on the part of the people that made the movie. Just by giving some explanations would have enhanced the movie. I found it totally boring and a bunch of nonsense with some good make-up effects thrown in.

• Gory, funny and scary

  dspikey882008-10-28

  I have just seen a screening of this at Ireland's Horrorthon festival. It was definitely one of the better films at the festival. A family go for a picnic in rural Ireland and get lost resulting in them being picked off one by one by the local towns zombie children. The acting was good sometimes and very bad the rest of the time but it didn't take away from the film at all. The American or British cast had awful Irish accents but that was expected. I was surprised to read it was not even shot in Ireland but new york which doubled very well considering the only indication that they are in Ireland is the Bus Eireann sign at the start of the movie. The film is funny, scary, overacted, gory and very well shot. The exterior shots of the cottages were extremely well lit and looked beautiful. It had the look of a high budget film and the script of a first year student project. Overall this was an excellent B-movie and it seemed to me everyone in the audience loved it from the amount of cheering and clapping throughout the film I can say it was the highlight of the festival (aside from night of the creeps).