Plague Town

2009 "It's in the blood."
4.5| 1h25m| NR| en
Details

An American family visiting their Irish roots accidentally stumbles on a horde of bloodthirsty mutant children.

Director

Producted By

Dark Sky Films

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Trailers & Clips

Also starring Lindsay Goranson

Also starring Daniel Martin Berkey

Reviews

Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever
KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.
Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.
Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
forslund I think the rating of 4.7 here is a little too low, as this movie while not a masterpiece it is quite interesting.A dysfunctional family are having a bonding experience in the Irish wilderness, where the miss the last bus home. At first it seems that they are quite alone, but then they encounter creepy elder people with unknown intentions and rather violent mutated children with very clear intentions. Most of the movie are the classical chase by homicidal children. While this part might seem a little drawn out, it has scares and a few really evil moments, while seeming more and more disturbing as we see the grownups and gradually realize what is happening and I think the final part of the movie is quite well thought out. It is also good to see the victims putting up a fight in the second half of the movie instead of just being fleeing bimbos.Other has claimed that the movie has no plot, but I think it has enough plot to hint at what is happening even though a lot is never explained.So while it is not a perfect movie and the characters greatly ignore horror rule number 1 (don't get separated) it is gory, has a very disturbing feeling (which most slasher movies lack) and an interesting ending.
MBunge 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.
Seb An arguing American family wander into an area populated by mutant kids with porridge on their faces. Unfortunately this movie has no atmosphere at all except for one scene with a creepy boggle eyed girl in the kitchen.Really I lost interest the moment I saw two small children wrap a piece of piano wire around the fathers head and literally cut his head in half. What the hell was that about? That doesn't even make sense.From there on there's just basically what you'd expect from a film of the inbred local genre but without any real flourishes of strangeness that it needed. Porridge on faces isn't a good substitute for deformity and social weirdness so the whole thing felt a bit flat. I liked the ending though, that at least was creepy and sinister.Really this is mediocre, if you want to watch a film about normal people wandering into the path of inbred weirdos there's about 300 better films to choose from.
snuhmcsnort 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.

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