The Plague (2006)
Clive Barker presents: another movie that he probably didn’t have much if anything to do with. In all fairness, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing given how good or bad he can be from book to book or story to story. It’s enough that his name is on the movie to merit a look, and–well, I’m not sure how to call this one. The movie’s merits and flaws are about as schizo as you can probably get.
"So, how about that there plague, huh?""Yup."
Premise: 4/5
I have a soft spot for the apocalypse–I blame Fallout and Dawn of the Dead for this. While there are no supermutants or zombies per se in the movie, there’s enough of an “end days” feeling from the word go. The movie starts on a day not so different from any other, where a single father goes into his child’s room to get him up for school. The problem is that his son is unresponsive, and when dad turns the kid’s head over, he sees the eyes are wide open and that he’s frothing around the mouth. Perfectly understandably, the dad rushes to the local hospital with his comatose son, only to be met with the absolutely disturbing sight of every other parent in the entire town there with their comatose kids. It begins to look even worse yet when they all suffer a big seizure at exactly the same time that ends at exactly the same time. A breaking news report on a TV in the hospital lobby paints an even worse picture of the state of affairs: literally every child 9 and under in the world has fallen into this same shut-down state, all of them also seizing at the exact same time in the entire world.
Flash forward 10 years, and we meet Tom Russell, who just recently got out of prison on parole (apparently he killed some guy in a bar fight for reasons he never explains). Tom’s only place to turn after getting out is his brother, the same father we saw in the opening from 10 years back. All the children are still comatose, and still seizing twice daily (10 AM and 10 PM), they’re all still alive and otherwise healthy–in fact they seem to be growing stronger every day, inexplicably. The UN is planning to enforce a worldwide ban on childbirth because the system just can’t support that many vegetable kids, and so far no form of treatment has helped bring them out of it. Every child born after the day of the first comas has also been born comatose, and for all intents and purposes, it looks like we’re at the end of the human race.
“Uhh . . . ’morning kids. Can you spell ’fucked’? It’s F-U-oh gawwwd!”
Unfortunately that awesomely creepy and disturbing premise can’t hold out for long: soon all the kids wake up and begin murdering the adults, and the survivors of the initial massacre are on the run for their lives, hiding from the ominously silent and intense gaze of the killer kids and trying to get to the nearby air force base in hopes of survival. Yeah, it basically degenerates into a zombie-less zombie movie (the kids don’t eat anyone, in case you were wondering, though they do seem to be taking the souls of the people they kill) at this point, although a rather weak and uninspired one. Kids chase our dwindling survivors, they find a place to hide out, one of the survivors does something dumb, kids find them again, they run more, etc. There’s a couple kind of interesting twists in the plot (such as the hive-mind it becomes apparent the kids share, and the fact that their tactics are evolving as they kill and seem to absorb the souls of their victims), but nothing that makes the movie must-see. Eventually we’re left with just Tom and his ex-wife surrounded by gun-toting creepy kids, and Tom realizes the one way to save her and possibly stop the worldwide slaughter is to willingly give up his soul to the children–he reminds his ex-wife of their plans to have kids before he went to jail, and how they wanted to have kids so they could pass on the “best part of ourselves” to them as “that’s what spreads.” They take him up on his offer, and leave his ex-wife in peace, free of fear, and happily un-murdered. It’s actually a nice and intriguing way to wrap up the story, although the execution left a lot to be desired.
That’s a dead priest on the ground with the kid who broke his neck straddling the corpse. I will refrain from making low-class “kids on top” jokes. Because I don’t go in for that dirty humor.
Cast: 1.5/5
Blech . . . almost everyone in the movie acted universally horribly. For a moment in the first part of the movie (before the zombocalypse began) I actually thought James Van Der Beek (who played Tom) was going to be pretty damned good, only to find out his characterization of Tom allowed only one mood and tone of voice ever, regardless of what was happening in the movie at the time. Actually, though, that complaint holds for practically everyone in the movie, now that I think about it. Ivana Milicevic (who played Tom’s ex-wife Jean) was a pretty face with still just one mood and tone of voice regardless of the events around her too. The two teens who were apparently just over the threshold of 9 that put the rest of the world under when shit went down (Josh Close and Brittany Scobie–Kip and Claire) just look spacy and spooked all the time, Brad Hunt (playing Jean’s brother Sam) usually just looks confused and impotent all the time, and so forth. It’s almost like no one knew exactly what was going on with the movie so they just stuck to something that probably worked okay for the director, who didn’t bother to try to get anything natural or, well, “good” out of them.
For some reason I just dig this shot–yeah, maybe it’s an “Exorcist” rip off, but it’s still cool. Also, the priest is friggin’ DEAD.
Technical: 1.5/5
Somebody needs to break the hand of whoever thought one-key piano tunes were scary. The music is just flat-out awful in this movie. It’s like every cliche “suspense! ” score of any movie (well, at least one note of them) made even worse by its repetition and utter lifelessness. The gore was nothing to write home about either, usually the kills just involve necks being broken and people being shot. The part where Sam’s leg gets a compound leg fracture from one of the zomboteens is nasty not because of the weak gore, but because of the horribly loud and wrong cracking sound it makes when it happens.
There were a couple inspired scenes (not because of the gore) that looked good and provided intriguing symbolism for the movie, but there were far more lame scenes and parts where the symbolism was so heavy-handed you could break through a wall with it. You might be better served breaking through that wall into a different movie.
Jesus is trying to tell these folks that the “Dead Father, Dead Mother, Dead Zomboteen” holy trinity is just not going to be a big seller. They can’t hear him ’cuz they’re dead though.
Popcorn Factor: 2.5/5
Again, I’m not sure how I feel about this movie as a whole. Most of it was weak, by-the-numbers horror stuff (Village of the Damned, Children of the Corn, Night of the Living Dead, and the list goes on) and not done particularly well either. On the other hand, the implications of what a world without children or any hope for future children would be like is compelling and more bleakly apocalyptic than most apocalyptic movies I’ve seen (the idea that once that year’s group of seniors graduate from high school, all schools will close their doors forever creates a surprising and effective “food for thought” moment in the beginning of the film that otherwise probably wouldn’t ever have crossed my mind). Plus, there’s a lot of people getting killed all over the place in this movie, and whoever choreographed the kids to move in such perfectly creepy sync with each other deserves a big damn cookie, because it’s awesomely freaky. I guess the biggest problem with the movie is that most of the best stuff is in the beginning, and soon sacrificed to the survival horror mode that runs through to the end of the film. I’ll say The Plague is an interesting movie, but falls far short of being a good one. It’s not intolerable, but it’s very skippable.