Coming to DVD Tuesday, May 12th
Cast:
Josslyn DeCrosta as Molly Monohan
Erica Rhodes as Jessica Monohan
David Lombard as Jerry Monohan
Lindsay Goranson as Annette Rothman
James Warke as Robin
Catherine McMorrow as Agnes Brawney
Elizabeth Bove as Sheila
Michael Donaldson as Chap
Directed by David Gregory
Review:
When Plague Town spreads to DVD and Blu-Ray this month, don’t give it a go based on creepy-cool cover art. This is one to avoid like swine flu.
Lit like the inside of a porta pot, with all the dimension of one, the production is so aggressively awful in every department that it’s easy to imagine craft services also being inept. Bad roast beef and overly peppered deviled eggs would partially explain the actors’ pained expressions. Long before anyone is stoned, flogged with leafy sticks that thunderously crack like Simon Belmont’s whip, or beaten in the face repeatedly with hubcaps (the impact only causing corn syrup to seep from the rim-job victim’s nostrils), these people look as if they’re roaming the Irish countryside in search of, well, a porta pot.
Dialogue turns out to be the true diarrhea. After an uninteresting prologue, the unappealing heroes are introduced: an American family lost in rural Ireland (actually Connecticut, looking remarkably like Connecticut). Dad Jerry (Lombard) leads the charge as they search on foot for his ancestral home. As they continue to come up empty, he delivers Herschell Gordon Lewis-esque gems like, “I know there is an idyllic spot around here somewhere. Oh. There they are. The ruins. Perfect!” Jerry’s fiancé Annette (Goranson) is along for the walk, hoping to connect with her soon-to-be stepdaughters, Molly and Jessica. The word “meds” is used in conjunction with Molly (DeCrosta, made up like a goth Brittany Snow), so she will be discredited when she spies a creepy kid in the woods. Her big sister Jessica (Rhodes) has picked up a Brit boy-toy named Robin (Warke, almost tolerable, which is high praise here) to tag along and spite daddy.
If the goal of the writing, direction and performance of these characters was for them to be so grating that the audience would be dying to see them die within a minute, mission accomplished (alas, the first bites it close to the 40-minute-mark). But wouldn’t it have been wiser to endear them to us, so we fear for their safety? That’s what worked in both the original The Hills Have Eyes and the remake. Then again, those films had actors who were believable as a family. The motley crew assembled here, probably via Craigslist, interact as if they met the week before at a table read â?? but to assume there was a table read is to assume there was a screenplay, instead of the more likely “lost family, woods, whispers, spooky kids, slit latex throats,” scrawled on a napkin.
As with Hills, the threat turns out to be mutants â?? mutant children in this case, most of whom have vampiric brows and love to whisper a whole lot. The girl ghoul on display in the movie’s print advertising has neither trait, just jawbreaker-sized doll eyes strapped over the nothing that formed in the womb. This is one of many attempts at Silent Hill-like surreal imagery. Precious few work, mainly because director David Gregory keeps them in view for far too long. Even simple gags of the kids wiping frame in the foreground suffer from this â?? the kids look like they’re power-walking, not running. In the same scene that this occurs, a pair of evil tweens wrap a victim with a long piece of piano wire, cutting through flesh and bone. It’s Plague Town‘s first mildly amusing moment, but hardened horror fans have seen the same dicing gag executed with greater effect in Cube, Resident Evil and 2001 Maniacs.
IMDB has the budget estimated at $1 million. There will likely be low-budget apologists who defend this tripe with, “Dude, all they had to work with was a million bucks!” Yes, but Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson did stellar work early in their careers, with budgets far less than that, inflation considered. No, not everyone can be Raimi or Jackson. The point is that limitations don’t have to enable laziness â?? they can force creativity and ingenuity. Hatchet‘s budget is rumored to be in the $1.5 million range. Yes, half a mil makes a huge difference when dealing with budgets this low, but that movie, flaws and all, looks like it had 5 times the financing of Plague Town. Say the budgets had been equal. One of the two would still feature fun characters, memorable dialogue and creative death scenes, and probably still find itself name-dropped by Paul Thomas Anderson in Total Film magazine, thanks to its script.
The editing room mantra appears to have been, “When a scene doesn’t cut together, dissolve between cuts and slap in some music to make it feel like a montageâ?¦ even when what’s on screen is happening in real time.” Still, no amount of post-production tinkering could’ve salvaged this mercilessly padded movie. Even at 88 minutes, you’ll feel as if you could have taken in a viewing of Schindler’s List, napped, and watched it again before Plague Town plods to its shoulder-shrug of an ending.
It’s no wonder that shortly after a limited theatrical run, Plague Town is being quarantined to disc, where it will hopefully die a quick death by word of mouth.
