CLIVE BARKER'S THE PLAGUE (a review)

Look Dawson's returned! Yeah for Dawson coming back...oh wait that's actually just James Van Der Beek and this is a movie produced by Clive Barker, so it's probably not a return to the innocent, wide-eyed North Carolina town known as...yeah, whatever.

So if this isn't that then what is it? Well, for starters it isn't very good. I say that upfront becuase the idea is actually pretty cool. The movie starts with a bunch of kids -- in fact ALL the kids everywhere -- falling into a catatonic state. For a decade all the children are sleeping. Even children that are born immediately fall into this coma-like state. Then they wake up and begin attacing adults. Now I personally think that could make for a muther of a zombie film -- kids vs parents in an all out zombie war? Awesome! Unfortunately, the movie just doesn't deliver. Lots of stuff happens, but it's kind of yadda yadda yadda and never amounts to anything. There's no reason given why the kids fall into the coma or why they wake up and attack people. It never really makes sense and nothing particularly cool happens. The storyline with Dawson -- er, Van Der Beek's character, is that he killed a guy in a bar fight but on purpose and went to prison and now he's out and feels bad about it or something, but everyone else is still angry because it was a stupid thing to do or something? Yeah, don't know, didn't care. It might make more sense if it amounted to anything and there are a couple scenes at the end where maybe it was supposed to but it didn't. And the ending didn't make sense.

Let's just call this a swing and miss. Here's what Clive Barker had to say about it (from his website):

"Plague was a screw-up...It is not a movie I am pleased with or proud of - it feels compromised and Hal [the director] got in his car and drove away before the picture was even locked... There were some great scenes, there really are some great scenes and the central notion is wonderfully perverse and apocalyptic but I don’t think Hal served his script how Hal-the-screenwriter imagined it, it was not the movie I read and that Hal pitched to us, a real shame as the script was just so damn good."

I don't remember the great scenes. I suppose you could do worse then seeing it, but you could also do much, much better so why bother.