Family members who seem to dislike one another, creepy Irish scenery and a girl that looks like the chick from the Grudge and the jigsaw puppet had a baby. All of the ingredients for a good horror flick are there, but wait, it's not good at all. It sucks big time.This movie started really promising with the family walking down the Hills of Ireland. The director really set a mood when the bunch started getting annoyed with one another. The film was great up to the point where everybody split up to have random encounters with strange mutant/zombie kids and their psychotic parents. There is no story, no reason why everybody gets killed and there is no coherence in the plot whatsoever. The only good thing about this movie is the cinematography and the actress who plays the youngest daughter of the family (that's why I gave it two stars)The pacing is bad. The dialog is scratch-your-ears-off horrible. There is no real story. The characters are hyper-dumb (ever for a horror flick it's too much)I watched the whole thing hoping I'd get an explanation for all the weirdness but no. Sometimes movies that leave the viewer wondering about the story are good (like in my opinion; the village, the Hamilton's, the Blair witch project), this one isn't. I bought it on DVD for only $2,- and still it feels like I wasted my money. I should have bought a nice hamburger, I would've enjoyed myself better.

Plague Town was either made by idiots or made for idiots. I'm leaning toward the "made for idiots" explanation because a lot of this production is quite competent for the low budget horror genre. A real creepiness is generated and pains were taken to give the main characters some believable and human interactions. Which makes it all the more frustrating, aggravating and disappointing that this movie repeatedly falls back on the absolute worst filmmaking characteristics of the horror genre. Over and over again, the people in Plague Town have to be dumber than lobotomized lab rats for the story to work and the audience has to be dumber than sterilized dirt not to notice how little sense everything makes. I can forgive a filmmaker for being a moron. I can't forgive these filmmakers for treating me and every other viewer like morons.This exercise in imbecility concerns an American family vacationing in Ireland. There's the thoroughly generic dad (David Lombard), his only slightly less generic fiancée (Lindsay Goranson), his bitchy blonde daughter (Erica Rhodes), his dark-haired daughter with a history of mental trouble (Josslyn DeCrosta) and an English bloke who hooked up with the bitchy blonde daughter a few days ago (James Warke). This little group gets off a bus in the middle of the Irish countryside, wanders around and bickers until they miss the bus back and are stranded for the night. That's when they're set upon by a band of marginally deformed children, which results in a lot of running, screaming and various forms of horror-movie violence.The first bit of Plague Town, when it's just the family and their British tag along, is perfectly okay. The actors all do a decent job and the story effectively establishes who these characters are and how their interact with each other. It's a nice example of how to get the audience to emotionally invest in the story and its characters before the crap hits the fan. When the running and the screaming starts, however, any viewer investment in this film is wiped out more quickly and completely than the worst stock market crash in history.Simply put, this thing is bang-your-head-against-the wall stupid. Horror movie characters are often more dull-witted than normal folk and I can let that sort of thing slide. Horror movie plots also usually don't stand up to a lot of critical analysis and I can let that sort of thing slide. I cannot let Plague Town slide. When the scary stuff starts, this film rapidly descends into a bottomless pit of asininity where the most fundamental elements of human behavior, logic and even causality are utterly ignored.Let me give you some examples of what I mean. There's a scene where a character is stabbed in the shoulder with a shard of glass. It's clearly a wound that's at least an inch or so deep, not a scratch that can be shrugged off. Yet after pulling out the shard, this character does NOT run away. Instead, he follows his attacker into a darkened room and you can guess how that turns out. In another scene, a character is lying on the road while three of the mutant children attack her. Even though the mutants are clearly smaller than their victim and aren't hitting her that hard, she makes absolutely no effort to get up, get away, defend herself or fight back. She just lies there on the road, for no explicable reason, and allows herself to be beaten. When some characters are trying to flee in a car, they get stopped on a bridge with the mutant children blocking the way forward. The mutants are at least 15 to 20 feet away from the car when one of them drags a chain that's attached to a tractor and hooks it underneath the car so it can't drive away. Doing something like that would take at least 30 seconds. Putting the car in reverse and stepping on the gas would take no more than 3 seconds, but the rules of time and space are suspended to allow the car to be trapped.That sort of doltish nonsense happens all the damn time in this movie. These filmmakers consistently take the audience's suspension of disbelief, eat it up, digest it, excrete it and then throw it against a Teflon wall where nothing sticks. I don't care how good you are at other aspects of storytelling, and Plague Town isn't exceptionally good at those things, when your characters have to behave like cretins who can barely feed themselves and the physical laws of the universe have to be disregarded in order to make your story work…YOUR STORY SUCKS ASS!!!!!If you know an idiot who likes horror flicks, give them this DVD for their birthday. Unless you are an idiot, though, don't even try and watch it yourself.

Matters worsen for a family of American tourists(and the oldest daughter's English boyfriend)after becoming stranded in the Irish countryside running afoul of "plagued" children, with disfigured faces, gleefully homicidal. Josslyn DeCrosta is Molly, always at odds with her smart aleck sister Jessica(Erica Rhodes, suitably capable of delivering her lines with just the right touch of smarmy bitchery)as they accompany their doctor father, Jerry(David Lombard)and his new fiancé, Annette(Lindsay Goranson). Of course, Jessica insists on spoiling everyone's evening, always cross and never at almost any point positive towards the family, for the exception of her new boyfriend Robin(James Warke). Once they miss their bus, looking for assistance, only trouble and terror awaits them since the wilderness is crawling with these soulless, fiendish little monsters, with a hideous visage, always giggling before assaulting their prey. These ghastly pale-skinned kids look like ghouls, in pursuit of fresh victims to slay. Successful documentary director David Gregory, known for his terrific and enlightening interviews with many fixtures of horror and exploitation, allows the carnage to escalate, and there's plenty of cruelty and mania on display. Eventually it's down to Molly and Jessica, often fleeing from the demonic creepies, hoping desperately that some type of help will surface. Unfortunate for them, the adults they come in contact are either loony or determined to have "healthy seeds", meaning that the girls will need to somehow escape from this place, and out of the hands of those that would use them to breed. Gregory sets up an interesting scenario at the opening possibly establishing that the reason behind the hell spawns might be of a religious nature. Whatever the case, the adults have become dedicated, regardless whether it is morally reprehensible or not, to give birth to healthy children, despite the usual outcome. Gregory ends the film on a real sour, depressing note. For gorehounds, Gregory and company orchestrate some pretty potent murder/assault sequences, with probably the most heinous being the use of a hub cap to flog a victim repeatedly across the face as she spits up blood. There's the use of wire to slowly take off half a victim's face, splitting apart his skull. Another grisly scene has a victim, frightened and disoriented after being shot in the face, having to pull his hand away from a butcher knife stuck deep in a table, who is cornered by the children, a sharpened stick broken off into his neck. The use of shard window glass, a hatchet, a butcher knife, and a sickle, all, at one point or another, stab or slice victims. Gregory brings us quite a freakshow, and these kids are certainly grotesque enough to leave an impression, particularly one girl with spooky eyeballs, and the deformed facial features are sure to repulse. This could develop a cult following.

A couple of nice young people, including a couple of sexy girls, are inadvertently stranded in rural Ireland. Two of them, a man and a young lady, explore what appears to be an abandoned house. A weirdo appears and demands that they come with him. The handsome young English fellow objects. El Freako raises a gun and shoots him bloodily through the neck.The handful of tourists is captured and brought to a family of mutants with strange faces. I woke up briefly for a while to watch one of the gargoyles beat a sobbing girl to death with a hub cap, deliberately and graphically slamming her face into hamburger before the coup de grace. She was covered with blood by then. There were multiple shots of her sister watching the murder through a veil of utter terror.If this sort of thing appeals to you, you should definitely watch it. To me it's a symptom of our decadence.The best interpretation I can lend this pernicious, malignant piece of poison is that the several elements of the production -- the cast and crew -- thought they might wangle a paid, tax-free vacation in Ireland out of it. They didn't really MEAN to debase our taste further.In a bit of sublime irony, the cuss words ("s***" and f*** and so on) are clipped out, while the most heinous violent acts are left intact. We don't mind our children being desensitized to homicide but, for the sake of God, let's not teach them that it's permissible to curse.