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Plague Town
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Dark Sky Films Review written by and copyright: Adam Palcher (3rd May 2009). |
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The Film
 The back of the case says, “fans around the world have hailed Plague Town as a new benchmark in independent horror.” There is nothing about this film that is new or exciting. Overwrought with every single cliché in the book this horror movie is a “wanna-be”, it wants to be way too many things at once. An obviously troubled American family tries to bond with their new stepmother, so they decide take a trip to Ireland. Just so happens they get lost, and wind up in a pocket of Ireland that has dark secrets with possessed and deformed children feeding off anything that comes their way. Unfortunately what comes their way is bad acting, over the top gore and a way too predictable plot. Now let me defend the movie by saying I’m sure there is an audience out there for these type of gore induced odes to the 70’s, but for me the attempts at trying to scare me with gore never work. It’s so much easier to scare an audience by what you don’t see and the possibility of something happening rather than making sure we stay on that shot of the severed head for a good 15 seconds. Case in point of “over-doing-it” the opening scene (not really spoiling anything) consist of a priest shooting a baby in the face with a gun than killing the priest with a fire poker to his brain. Shooting babies and killing priests, seriously? I’m sorry sir you have lost me and it’s scene one. The family dynamic of this film is laughable with every cliché problem and character type you can imagine. We have the troubled daughter who is on medication, the annoying, bitchy daughter who has a problem with the step mom, her careless day old boyfriend, the step-mom that is just trying to bond and the dad who obviously has no control of any situation. I could not get invested in anyone in this film and could care less when they met their demise. The only redeemable aspects of the movie would be the make-up of the children; it does look scary, but only at times. The main child Rosemary (Kate Aspinwall) has a crazy eye mask that is very freaky. The score is your basic rise and swell at the right moments type of job, though it did seem to stick out more that the plot. Obviously, I’m hard to please when it comes to horror movies, it took the classic ideas from films such as "Rosemary’s Baby" (1968) and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974) but decided to gore it up and invest me in a world of blood and super-natural, instead they invested me in a world of predictable boredom.
Video
This transfer is nothing really to be proud of, presented in high-definition 1080p 24/fps in 1:78:1 ratio with AVC MPEG-4 compression at 23 MBPS average bitrate. The landscapes of Ireland looks credible and sharp, but most of the colors are washed out and are absent of any kind of detailed contrast. Even with a reduced budget this is shot on 35mm film and I was expecting a little bit more.
Audio
Presented in English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround and English PCM 2.0 surround lossless. The DTS-HD audio track seemed to drop out during a few scenes of dialogue and overall was nothing to exciting. Like I mentioned above the score did have a prominent back-end presence that does its job. The subtitles are presented in English, French and Spanish.
Extras
Dark Sky has released this film with an audio commentary, two featurettes, a short film and the film's original theatrical trailer. Below is a closer look at these extras. Audio commentary over the movie with the co-writer/director David Gregory and producer Derek Curl. Gregory is definitely more interesting than Curl in this commentary, mainly because I can tell he is a smart guy and is genuinely in love with this genre of movies. They tell stories or low budgets and on location shooting. Only worth a listen if you care enough to get more “in-depth”, if that’s possible. "A Visit To Plague Town" featurette runs 28 minutes and 35 seconds and covers the making of "Plague Town." Interviews with the actors, producer and director giving us a basic run down of their experience. Here we find out that the Ireland background is actually Connecticut, the whole cast and crew stay in local hotels and the main “family” of actors stayed in a house all through shooting to authenticate their characters. HA! Most of the shooting was at night for a month straight. A good chunk of the stories are repeated on the commentary, as well. "The Sounds of Plague Town" is a 16 minute and 9 second featurette of the director David Gregory and the sound mixer, creator and editor Mark Raskin talking about the score and background noises of the film. Not really that interesting unless your really into the aspect of sound. Raskin goes off for most of the 16 minutes rambling about never getting sleep and how he came onto the project. They also discuss Gregory’s background in producing “making of” featurettes. The length is too long and probably could have accomplished everything it had to say in half the time. There's a blu-ray exclusive short film "Scathed" that was made in 1995 by David Gregory runs 40 minutes, his first film ever and you can tell. It basically looks and feels like a student film, which it probably was. Nothing special unless you really are into this director and see what else he has done. With such an impressively long IMDB page I’m wondering why this was “exclusive”. The original theatrical trailer of "Plague Town" runs 2 minutes and 17 seconds.
Overall
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