The cover art for "Plague Town" is certainly frightening enough, suggesting a hellish cinematic ride sure to rally up the demons in your soul. Sadly, "Plaguetown" never really lives up to its' promise. While the film is artfully shot and bestowed with a oppressively bleak feel, the script is predictable and and it suffers under the film's small budget.

 

"Plaguetown" opens with the unusual sight of a priest being summoned to the side of a women about to give birth. After the child is delivered, the pious man of God draws a handgun on the infant, only to be killed with a hatchet by the distraught father. This tense beginning is expertly staged and quite well acted. It also is the high point of the film as the rest of the production descends into a weird abyss of morbid predictability.

 

The film jumps to over a decade later, when we are introduced to the Moynihan family, who are dysfunctional to a spectacular degree. They're taking a vacation in the Irish countryside to strenghthen the bonds of family. The father has remarried, one daughter is on a dazzling array of psychiatric drug and the other is so bitchy she could pass as a walking advertisement for Zoloft. So it's understandable things are a little tense in the Moynihan household and a vacation might be in order. The family soon finds themselves in a village where outsiders are unwelcome, the residents so backwoods you can practically hear banjoes twanging, and something has gone horrifically wrong with the local children. Needless to say, things go downhill fast in a hideous fashion.

 

 There's little doubt that director David Gregory is an imaginative and highly talented director, who works miracles   with a scant $1 million dollar budget. Gregory fused every frame of "Plaguetown" with a fearful undercurrent of  dread, and even manages to make scenes filmed under a cloudless blue sky appear to have a malevolent melancholy. Majority of this film was shot after dark, which is not normally a director's friend. A helmer of lesser talent would have allow the action to be swallowed up in the gloom, but Gregory is skilled enough to use the shadows to his advantage to enhance the feeling of doom and hopelessness. Cinematographer Brian Rigney Hubbard utilizes some nifty camera angles, giving some of the more graphic scenes more emotional impact than they rightly deserve.

 

Ironically, it is the script credited to John Cregan and the aforementioned director that drags the production down from the hellish heights it aspires to. The film may be a wonder to the eyes, but the brain becomes restless by the predicability of the story and the lack of any scenes that are viscerally frightening. Fears of isolation and xenophobia also come up, but are never really directly addressed; it's like the writers threw the ideas in haphazardly and  then forgot what they wanted to do with them. The characters also seem to be of the cardboard variety, that inspire little reason for the audience to be more than mildly concerned about their fate. The editing work by John Crowley is competent, but at times he cuts too quickly from one scene to an entirely different one; a disorientating effect that occasionally makes "Plaguetown" look like it got mixed up in the ADR workstation with another film. The music by Mark Raskin is also a bit forgettable; the producers would have been wiser to simply go to Wal Mart and by one of Halloween music compilations available for $6.

 

In all fairness, the movie's small budget hampers the efforts of the production staff, especially in the death sequences. Normally having a character beaten to death with a hubcap or decapitated with fishing wire would be done with more elan, but with the limited funds available the effect is rather muted. The cast consist of relative unknowns who perform their roles fairly well, with only one exception. As the father of the doomed family, David Lombard bears an uncanny resemblance to George Clooney. That's about all he contributes to the film, as his onscreen prescence has all the charm and charisma of an old man's nut sack. 

 

"Plaguetown" is an extremely well directed film, that has the unfortunate problem of being a bit underfunded and saddled with an underachieving script. But while the final result is only a somewhat effective horror film, the audience is at least introduced to David Gregory. He's proven himself worthy of being a talent to watch.

 

The Region 1 BluRay was released in 1080p HD picture and 5.1 DTS-HD sound, which is a bit of an overkill. The picture looks crisp, but with the scenes shot in dark muted colors or at night you never get the full effect of high definition. The sound tend to go up and down in volume, making for the annoying necesssity of keeping the remote within hand's reach. There are also two production featurettes, "A Visit to Plaguetown" and "The Sounds of Plaguetown". Both are really best appreciated by die hard fans of the film, whatever few there are. The audio commentary with David Gregory and producer Derek Curl is actually interesting and frequently more entertaining than the film itself. A neat extra is David Gregory's student film, if anything to show how he's grown as a filmmaker from then to "Plaguetown".