Clive Barker's The Plague plagued me with many questions . . .
Not the least of which was how could Clive Barker have put his name on this pile of dung?
The first ten or so minutes of this film felt like there was some real potential. I mean a whole group of kids just comatose and seizing with no apparent reason was very appealing to me. But then after that I watched the whole film thinking they were going somewhere with the storyline and unfortunately, I was sadly mistaken. Once the kids woke up, the movie was all down hill from there.
I'd like to tell you about the film here but there's just not a whole lot to tell. You've got a father (Arne MacPherson) who steps into his son's (Chad Panting) room and into his own worst nightmare when his son doesn't wake up. His boy as well as all the rest of the children of the world stay this way for 10 years at which time the boy's Uncle Tom (James Van Der Beek) enters into the picture fresh from prison where he has spent some time repenting for a bar fight gone awry. Not sure what the significance of this was supposed to be because it seemed to me they never did anything with it.
I guess they had to get him into the picture somehow though as it seemed that Uncle Tom was to be the savior of the film. But the next segment of the movie just dealt with a group of adults running from a group of kids who had been in a coma for the last 10 years. Which brings up an interesting question - if these kids have been bed bound for the last 10 years, how is it they are just able to get up, run around, shoot guns and disable every car in town? What happened to muscle atrophy? You'd think at the very least they would be a bit slow, but no- they seem perfectly healthy and able to run all over town like nobody's business. The only thing that differentiates them from anyone else is that they all seem to have dark circles around their eyes.
And then to the question of why - why are these kids suddenly awoken from their slumber only to want to kill everything that moves? The only thing I could gather was that they were stealing peoples' souls? But there was no explanation or really any attempt at an explanation for this in the entire film. Didn't these kids have souls of their own?
One other thing that bothered me about
Clive Barker's The Plague was their severe underutilization of Dee Wallace-Stone. That just pissed me off considering she was the best part of the film. Not to mention that the ending just left me shaking my head and wondering how on earth I would get those 88 minutes of my life back. Or at least 78 of them . . .
So, in case you couldn't tell already, I wouldn't recommend this movie - not anything after the first 10 minutes of it anyway.
Clive Barker's The Plague Movie Cast and Credits
Directed by
Hal Masonberg
Writing credits
Hal Masonberg and
Teal Minton
Cast (in credits order)
James Van Der Beek ... Tom Russel
Ivana Milicevic ... Jean Raynor
Brad Hunt ... Sam Raynor
Joshua Close ... Kip
Brittany Scobie ... Claire
Bradley Sawatzky ... Nathan Burgandy
John P. Connolly ... Sheriff Cal Stewart
Dee Wallace ... Nora (as Dee Wallace-Stone)
Jon Ted Wynne ... Dr. Jenkins
Arne MacPherson ... David
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Hilary Carroll ... Alexis
David Stuart Evans ... Intern
Jacqueline Loewen ... Lacey
Katlin Mathison ... Red shirt boy
Garth Merkeley ... Human Boy
Jason Mitchell ... Bob Dole
Chad Panting ... Eric Russell
Jennifer Pudavick ... Death by Sam
Gene Pyrz ... Jim
Henry Quach ... Cagney
Chuck Robinson ... Security Guard
Andrea Shawcross ... Nurse #2
Jan Skene ... Nurse Hansen
Matthew J. Kok ... Featured extra (uncredited)
More Reviews of Clive Barker's The Plague
Review of Clive Barker's The Plague from SciFi WeeklyClive Barker's The Plague Movie Review from FeoAmante
