A Praga

This is not a great horror film - but it's not a super stinker either. Here's the deal: - If Texas Chainsaw Massacre is your favorite type of horror, you will not like this one at alllll. The gore and zombie fight scenes are not very impressive.

• If you like more "use your brain" type subtle horror films, this one does make you think. It offers no clear explanation for why or how, but it does offer a few glimmers that make you wonder that the writers/film-makers have some point they are trying to get across. Unfortunately, even if you come to a conclusion here (as a couple of other reviewers have - and I agree with their conclusions), it's doesn't help the fact that the movie is just kinda there through 75% of the film, despite the very interesting initial premise.

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

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.

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.

i watched the movie and i thought it was really well directed. James has also did a great job. it contains a bunch of really thrilling scenes. he will be able to experience what the movie characters are feeling...all the horror, pain, scare, despair, it almost feels like you are there. however, the story is not well developed, coz even despite the effort to make this to look real, it seems surreal and there are a couple of things that were explicit (or even implicit -that i've noticed-). the end of the movie could also be more mysterious or cause more impact, but even though it is a good movie, specially when compared to what we can see in theaters these days.