Plague Town (2008)
Studio: Dark Sky Films
DVD Release Date: May 12, 2009
Directed By: David Gregory
Cast: Josslyn DeCrosta, Erica Rhodes, James Warke
Review By: Sam Hawken

The rural horror subgenre is a tough one to crack, at least judging from the success rate of movies that followed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Part of the problem has been a tendency to hew too closely to the original, chainsaw-y model, while another has been the sometimes awkward attempts to break free of that mold. One could make the case that the Friday the 13th movies are a wrinkle on the subgenre, though only a wrinkle.

Plague Town is a movie that knows its rural-horror pedigree. Unfortunately the bloodlines are a little too easy to trace for the audience, as well. There’s a little bit of Children of the Corn (all eight hundred in the series), a touch of Village of the Damned, a dollop of The Hills Have Eyes and even some of The Wicker Man. Minus the bees and Nicolas Cage’s increasingly terrifying toupées, thankfully. Certainly we have our Texas Chainsaw echoes, too, because no rural horror movie would be complete without at least a nod to the granddaddy of them all. But just as some films tried to be the next in line to inherit Tobe Hooper’s throne by practically photocopying the screenplay, Plague Town suffers from referencing too much and creating too little.

We begin with a small group of travelers — some related, some not — in a remote locale. There is bickering, because there’s always bickering going all the way back to Franklin and Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and eventually our travelers are stranded where they shouldn’t be. In this case, the setting is somewhere in Ireland, but in a twist more unexpected than anything else in the movie, Plague Town was shot in Connecticut. That has to be some kind of first.

Our menu of victims are not all that different from the usual fodder for rural horror. There’s the father, David Lombard, looking entirely too young to have an 18- or 19-year-old daughter and his bride to be, played by Lindsay Goranson. They’ve decided to take this Irish vacation in an attempt to bond with troubled daughter Molly (Josslyn DeCrosta) and wildly annoying daughter Jessica (Erica Rhodes). Jessica’s dragged along an Englishman, Robin (played by James Warke) on whom she’s crushing heavily, just to make things more awkward and difficult.

As usually happens in these things, the stranded few try to reason their way out to a solution — in this case, it’s walk down the road their bus would have taken them — and eventually make some profoundly stupid mistake, like leaving a paved road in favor of a gravel one. This sequence of events, plus the relatively slow building of tension toward the inevitable, is part and parcel of the rural horror experience, and we’d lose something essential without out. When the 30-minute mark hits (almost to the second), the action begins… sort of.

The problem with cribbing endlessly from other, better movies is that oftentimes those ingredients don’t gel into something organic, coherent and therefore scary. This nameless Irish town has a crop of mutant children — way too many for the established timeline, as it happens — and the usual disregard for societal norms that we see in such films. There are hints of paganism in the air (more of The Wicker Man?), as well. But how do all the oddball residents, disfigured albino children and strange suggestions of occult ritual fit together? The short answer is: they don’t. Even by the time the movie runs out of steam after 80 or so minutes and rolls the credits, there are still far more questions than answers, though I didn’t have enough engagement to think too long about it.

Plague Town looks pretty darned good, which makes its derivative, slipshod assemblage of rural horror cliché all the more disappointing. If the movie were produced badly it could be dismissed as hackwork, but there’s some clear attention to detail in the costuming, the cinematography and such. The box art features the silent, chalk-white Rosemary, with false eyes emblazoned on a strip of cloth where her real eyes would go if she had any. That’s creepy stuff. Too bad it’s just a throwaway between the usual sequences of running, falling down or bloody mayhem.

Gore fans get their treats here and there, though Plague Town is by no means soaked in gore. Even when things really start to get rolling we’re never treated to something as graphic and affecting as a meathook impalement or even a severed limb. Much mileage is gotten out of a simple shotgun wound to the face of James Warke’s character, but even that grows a little staid by the end and a bizarre, ritualistic hanging that follows is more inexplicable than anything else.

Worse than anything else — be it the uneven pacing, the been-there-done-that set pieces or what have you — is the way Plague Town doesn’t even have an ending. No great secrets are resolved, no shocking climax is reached. Instead the movie just… ends. And it ends pretty much where we expect it to by the close of the first hour, rendering all the sound and fury of the intervening 20 or so minutes kind of pointless.

Director David Gregory has a fairly sizable list of credits, and it would be see him work with something someone else wrote, as occasionally being involved in the script and story can make a director overlook shortcomings he or she might otherwise see. Plague Town has clear strengths, but its weaknesses all trace back to the screenplay and its tendency to lean one what’s been done before without taking those elements one step further.

Brutal As Hell Rating:

2 out of 5