The Plague

This movie started really well and, as others noticed in their comments, ended rather obscurely. One could say that if you mix Children of the Damned with Night of the Living Dead, you get this movie, which would have made a reasonably scary and interesting film. However, they added a bit of Steinbeck leftism, a bit of obscure clerical writings, probably Catholic only, and crashed into an uninteresting and meaningless ending.

That doesn't mean it wasn't good. The start has that nice feel of Night of the Living Dead (the black and white version, the good one). The characters are presented and developed rather well. However, after a while, they all start dying stupidly and only show that using emotions in time of crisis is plain idiotic. After all, this is the only moral in this movie.

Bottom line: a film with a great potential turns out to be an average movie.

Although the premise isn't original or innovating ("Village of the Damned", "Children of the Damned", "Who Can Kill a Child", "The Children of Ravensbeck"…), I'm always enthusiast about a horror movie revolving on murderous – and whether or not zombified – children, but you always have to bear in mind that a concept such as this could be bound to a lot of restrictions as well. Let's face it, the idea of murdering children and/or children getting murdered remains a fairly sensitive topic and especially nowadays filmmakers don't always have the courage to depict everything in great detail. Another big issue is that the scripts are rarely ever strong enough to come up with an explanation that is simultaneously disturbing and plausible. "The Plague", which is somehow linked to the creative writing mastermind Clive Barker, is fairly adequate and satisfying when it comes to dealing with the first issue (there are some very graphic child murders here), but it miserably fails in the plotting department. I just finished watching the film five minutes ago, but please don't ask me to summarize the plot. The film benefits from a handful of really powerful sequences and an occasionally unsettling apocalyptic atmosphere, but the screenplay is incredibly disorderly, incoherent and it explains absolutely nothing at all. On a seemingly average day, all the children on the earth under the age of 9 fall into a coma. Twice a day, like clockwork, they all start twitching together but the reasons for that are anyone's guesses as well. Then, as spontaneously as they fell into a coma, they all awake ten years later as mad zombies and promptly begin to exterminate all the adults for … you guessed it … no apparent reason whatsoever. The film follows a small group of people's quest for survival in a quiet little US town, among them an ex-married couple (Ivana Milicevic and James "Dawson" Van Der Beek in a totally unconvincing performance), a couple of cops and a pair of adolescents who're spiritually linked to the children. The sequences illustrating the zombie children prowling the deserted streets for adults to kill are reasonably effective and creepy, as well as the make-up jobs on their faces, but the film never achieves to be truly terrifying.

In The Plague all kids mysteriously fall into a coma, as do all children born afterwards. Ten years pass and the kids suddenly wake up and start killing people. That sounds OK doesn't it? Kids can be creepy as they were in Children of the Corn but not here, because this movie is dreadful.

The kids don't use any special mind powers, which might have been scary, instead they run around attacking people like mini-zombies for most of the film. I say people but the town seems to have six inhabitants and there is never any sign of the cops, the army or even other people..not even dead other people! The kids aren't scary and cheat by popping up (usually behind people) in their crappy makeup but somehow still not managing to look like anything other than a bunch of stage school hopefuls who are about to have their careers sunk by this howler of a bad movie.

I couldn't get over how the characters just teleport around locations with no sense of time or distance involved. Unfortunately for them so do the kids, they just pop up equally illogically. There's no continuity either. In one scene one of the little scrotes gets shot with a shotgun at point blank range. Result? He looks at his wound like the terminator, it clearly hasn't even hurt him. About ten minutes later a kid gets shot with a pistol from across the room and dies immediately. If the entire film wasn't utterly boring you'd probably not notice or at least overlook it.

If that was it then you'd just have a four star disappointment on your hands but no, the film has to go one better and throw a load of pseudo-religious garbage into the mix. The plot makes no sense and doesn't conclude properly. There's no resolution and you aren't left wondering "wow, what was that about" you are just left feeling like they didn't have an ending so they just called it the end and that was that.

I like Clive Barker and I like most of the films based on his writing but this is just terrible. I can't think of one good thing to say about it. Oh and the acting is crap too but you've probably guessed that already.

This movie has an effectively mysterious and creepy opening, but the script writer obviously had no idea where to go with it.

The plague's effects on young children throughout the world is an interesting premise. Simultaneously, kids everywhere lapse into a clinically unexplainable coma. The movie seems like a well-mixed concoction of elements from "Village of the Dead," "Night of the Living Dead," "Children of the Corn," and others. After ten years of nightly seizures and under constant care during their long sleep, the mass coma ends as mysteriously as it had begun. The reawakened coma victims are now blood thirsty and violent teenagers, seeking out victims like a vengeful mob. They are not slow, clumsy automatons like typical zombies, and are very capable at using weapons, making them quite formidable and deadly.

Clearly, there must be some impetus for the coma and its violent aftermath, but neither the reason for the spontaneous coma nor the party responsible are ever revealed. There is a wafer-thin spiritual context offered, but even this is woefully poor in development or purpose. The movie is just a fight for survival sequence with lots of bodies and a predictable outcome.

Very disappointing ending makes the whole thing pointless. Don't bother with this one.

In the not to distant future, every human child under age nine mysteriously falls into a coma. Most of the kids are hospitalized, but a few are cared for at home. Twice a day, they have convulsions (which seems to give their bodies a good workout). "The Plague" extends to newborns, also; all are born comatose. As years pass, no healthy babies are born. Births are discouraged, and abortions are mandatory. The victims remain comatose. With no functioning offspring, the human race is threatened with extinction.

This is a reasonably well set-up, but ultimately pointless, confusing, and unsatisfactory story. It's like "Village of the Damned" and "Night of the Living Dead" were copulated, and gave birth to a script. Then, they tried to film it as "The Grapes of Wrath" with James Van Der Beek (as Tom Russell) taking on the protagonist's role and Ivana Milicevic (as Jean Raynor) wanting to take over. The best thing you can say about the ending is that because it's so bad, any subversive message will go right over your head.

**** The Plague (9/5/06) Hal Masonberg ~ James Van Der Beek, Ivana Milicevic, Brad Hunt, Joshua Close