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Masonberg's independent horror movie "The
Plague" is a decent genre entry, right up to
the last few minutes when everything goes to hell
in a hand basket, and instead of an actual ending,
the audience is treated to some New Age mumbo
jumbo about fear and how if you don't feel fear
your fart doesn't stink. Or somesuch. While it's
true enough that most movies can stand a little
improvement, it's terribly disappointing how
quickly "The Plague" goes from being a
good, solid genre thriller made on a budget to
something incredibly insipid. Dying, as it were,
with an inane whimper instead of zombie exploding
goodness, which would have been preferable for
these types of movies.
Our film opens with every
child in the world under 9 years old falling into
a coma -- a sort limbo state, where their bodies
continue to function, but their minds seems devoid
of consciousness. Fast-forward 10 years later, as
we follow recently paroled ex-con Tom Russel
(James Van Der Beek, all grizzled and muscled up
and as far removed from "Dawson's Creek"
as he could possibly get) back to his small home
town. No sooner does Tom's ex-wife Jean (Ivana
Milicevic), who is also the town doctor, spurns
his offer of reconciliation than the comatose
children wakes up -- zombiefied!
While it's never clearly
established if the kids are in fact zombies, they
certainly act like it. At various points, their
faces are even painted white to give them that
nice zombiefied touch that all zombies must have.
And of course they even eat their victims, which
don't really make sense. Or actually, the zombie
kids only eat their victims early in the film, but
later they start "delivering" them from
life with some kind of holy ritual -- after which
they either eat the victims or mutilate them. How
else to explain why some victims are left whole
and others are viciously eviscerated? If it's not
obvious by now, the zombie elements of "The
Plague" are amusingly inconsistent and
puzzling.
For the most part,
Masonberg's "The Plague" offers up solid
genre entertainment. A beefed up James Van Der
Beek makes for a good laconic protagonist, even if
his character doesn't end up doing a whole lot
when all is said and done. In service of character
development, Masonberg and co-writer Teal Minton
allows for 20 minutes or so of dramatic tension at
the beginning of the film, as we watch Van Der
Beek's Tom re-adjust to civilization after his
prison stint. His disastrous attempt at
reconciliation with wife Jean, his
re-acquaintances with drinking buddy Sam (Brad
Hunt), and most notably, his awkward re-insertion
into the life of his big brother.
But of course this is a movie
about zombies, and once the character stuff is
dealt with, we have to get to the killing and
running and last standing. (These movies always
invariably end up with survivors making a last
standing in a building of some sort.) The revived
zombie kids seem to have some type of hive-like
consciousness, as can be evidenced by the
"whispery talk" that fills the
soundtrack whenever the kids get together for some
adult eatin' and killin' fun. Having been in a
coma for the last 10 years, one supposes that they
might have forgotten everything (except that whole
kill the adults part, I mean), thus they are
forced to relearn. So when one of them learns how
to use a gun, the others learn as well. So in
theory, all kids around the world would start
attacking the adults with their bare hands before
graduating to guns and C4 explosives.
"The Plague" mostly
works, at least until the confusing final Third,
when things go from "pretty good" to
"Jesus, what were Masonberg and Minton
thinking? This thing is going down faster than
Anna Nicole Smith chasing after peanut butter
cookie crumbs!" By which I mean "The
Plague" becomes something beyond what it
should have been, and does the one thing that
genre pictures should never do -- it strives
for something substantive. There is ambition and
there is the impossible; a movie about kids that
wake up from 10-year comas and becomes zombies
should not
strive to be deep.
To give Masonberg credit, he
does make honest attempts to flesh out his
characters. In the film's early parts, we get a
sense of who these people are, which makes it easy
to care about what happens to them later in the
film. As well, the script avoids the one major
pitfall of the genre -- it doesn't offer cardboard
stereotypes as characters. For example, while the
town sheriff shows some opposition to Tom's
parole, he isn't the Odious Bad Guy with a Badge
that many authority figures are in these movies;
also, teen characters Kip and Claire are not
mouthy smartasses, are rather thoughtful and
honest in their emotions.
My advice to genre fans would
be to watch "The Plague" up to the
moment when Jean engages in an improbable shootout
with two zombie kids tasked with guarding a
bridge. At this point, you should simply turn the
movie off, because what follows will only delude
what you've enjoyed so far. Trust me when I say
there's nothing else to like about "The
Plague" from this point on. Why someone would
make a genre movie, about kid zombies, and then
turn it into some meditation on life and death and
fear and cosmic checkers is beyond me.
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