Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 5, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Good news in a horror movie’s credits: Clive Barker’s name as a producer (not to mention a presenter). Bad news in a horror movie’s credits: eleven other names listed as producers or executive producers. And The Plague (Barker’s first horror film not based on his story, characters or concept) has the feeling of a project in which too many cooks drained all the flavor right out of the soup.
It certainly starts promisingly enough: The premise of all the world’s children suddenly falling into simultaneous comas not only provides for global trauma but (since all newborns succumb to unconsciousness as well) the possible threat of human extinction as well. In the early scenes, director Hal Masonberg, working from a script he wrote with Teal Minton, does an evocative job of distilling the international tragedy down to an intimate focus, centering on a small town where Tom (James Van Der Beek) returns home after spending years in jail for killing a man in a fight. There’s a palpable sense of melancholy as the citizens have gotten used to dealing with the unconscious youngsters, some of whom are kept in a makeshift facility in the local school gymnasium while others are cared for at home. Laszlo Remenyi’s baleful music helps with the atmosphere—and then the kids have to go and spoil it all by waking up en masse and turning The Plague into just another variation on the theme of a violent horde chasing and besieging a dwindling band of survivors.
As the youthful attackers bloodily dispatch certain of their elders and do…something to others, the movie never kicks into a higher gear, nor does it do enough digging down to exploit the primal fear of one’s offspring turning on them (or the necessity of destroying one’s own kids). On the few occasions it does attempt to tap that vibe, the results are predictable—when a mother (Dee Wallace Stone) tearfully approaches her afflicted daughter, who seems to be OK…well, she’s the only one who won’t be able to figure out how that’s gonna end. Neither the characters nor the mayhem are distinctive enough, and the whole thing wraps up with only an inconclusive, unsatisfying hint of the nature of the plague and the purpose of the afflicted youth.
The film does have a classy look thanks to veteran cinematographer Bill Butler (Jaws), whose work receives a fine showcase in Sony Pictures DVD’s 2.35:1 transfer (a fullscreen version is also included, but you know not to bother with that one). The professional veneer somewhat belies what rumors have suggested was a troubled production, a suspicion borne out by the fact that only editor Ed Marx and supporting actors Brad Hunt and Josh Close could be corralled for the audio commentary. Considering that Marx wasn’t on set and Hunt and Close are offscreen for quite a bit of the running time, it’s not surprising that there are dead spaces on the track, but for a while Marx has some good observations to make about the craft of cutting to not only shape scenes but express character, and Hunt is pretty funny as he quips about everything from that lengthy lineup of producers in the opening credits to the reactions Van Der Beek engendered on the small-town Canadian location (“The girls wanted to have sex with him and the guys wanted to whup him!”). As the film winds on, though, they’re left with little to do but compliment their collaborators and drop sporadic mild hints about problems behind the scenes.
The disc’s only other extra feature is a collection of about 18 minutes of deleted material, most of which is character stuff that doesn’t flesh out the onscreen personalities as much as you might hope. One of them does explain a particular phenomenon related to the plague (the youngsters’ bodies all going into spasms every 24 hours at 10 p.m.), while another really should have been left in the film: a powerful moment in which a young woman played by Brittany Scobie has to kill an attacking child with her bare hands. Apparently the nature of the scene was intense enough to run afoul of the ratings board, even though it’s not really that violent—it’s mostly played, with great effectiveness, on the face of feature-film newcomer Scobie, who receives deserved praise from her co-stars on the commentary. This is one of the only times The Plague taps into those primal fears mentioned above, and it’s a shame it had to be relegated to a supplement.
