Plague Town (2009)

I love this movie so much

Touches You

Strong and Moving!

Awesome Movie

Plague Town is a B-Movie in the vein of Wrong Turn, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A dysfunctional family discovers a village of horrors in a remote Irish countryside.The movie relies tired horror tropes, and is only occasionally scary. ***SPOILER*** Notably when the children first show up by the car, and the subsequent beating with the hub cap. ***END SPOILER***Too many "scary" scenes are long shots of heavily prosthetic actors basically standing around throwing random things at a "terrified" character. The principal acting isn't terrible, at times it's almost improve ("We have one!")Notable performance from Josslyn DeCrosta, though she and Erica Rhodes become pretty annoying as the second half of the movie goes south. Not to be a voyeur but with the "plot" of this movie and 3 attractive actresses it would have made sense for the girls to show a little skin.The soundtrack is pretty good, though constantly there. If you are a die hard horror fan, this movie will probably entertain you. I recorded this along with "Daisy Chain" as part of the Chillers St. Patrick's Day marathon. Daisy Chain is a much better film, but I'm sure that Plague Town will find an audience.

"Plague Town" has something many horror movies are lacking, especially the more recent ones. That being charismatic, interesting characters.The family members really don't get along too well, resulting in humorous dialogue which works in the context of the scenes. Even when it's clear something isn't right, the father tries to prevent his daughter from leaving, thinking it too dangerous. Of course when her boyfriend volunteers, said father encourages him.The problem? Well, after people start dying, without expendable characters the character dynamics fall apart, resulting in a horror movie considerably less entertaining when the horror begins than previously.At "Gorezone Weekend of Horrors", it did have one scene which made the audience gasp due to shock. I'm not spoiling that part.

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.

Having read some of the other reviews of this film before I actually saw it, I wasn't expecting much. To be honest, some of the acting was stiff, and the dialogue wasn't exactly written by Harold Pinter, but those areas are easily forgiven when weighed against the overall feel of the film. A sense of dread permeates the film due to an excellent sound design, great location shooting, minimal dialogue, and as another reviewer pointed out, not every aspect of the story is didactically explained. The filmmaker has respected the audience enough to 'show not tell', which is a welcome change from poorly written claptrap lining the videostore shelves these days. And the ending was fantastic - true horror leaves you with that lump in your throat as you imagine all of the things still left in store for the protagonists once our involvement in the story ends.