Saw this at the Horrorthon yesterday and couldn’t believe how terrible it was.
There is pretty much no story whatsoever. What masquerades as story is as follows: a disjointed American family (and a tag along English lad, who knows how to speak Irish I might add…so true to life…) are in the Irish countryside wandering around, looking for “ruins”, bitch and moan at each other, then miss the last bus back to “town”. They refuse help from an old man and take refuge in an abandoned French car when the night sets in, and the noises become too much. One by one they head out for help but are set upon by a bunch of deformed children.
The script is poor, the actors do their best with it, but that’s not saying much, the direction is unimaginative, and the editing….Jesus, the editing. There is no suspense at all, there are pointless scenes of blood-letting, massive plot holes and moments which really insult it’s audience. There’s nothing terrifying about a girl, tied to a tree, being slapped with thin wisps of branches by laughing children. Someone standing motionless while the camera spins around them, and noises are heard is not terrifying. A plastic hubcap from a car is not a particularly threatening murder weapon…even if the sound effects make it out to be metal. Looney old women banging two pots together shouting out “we’ve got one here” followed by, in the worst delivery possible, “he’s getting away” is not creepy, and adds nothing.
A man who was shot in the face, doesn’t acknowledge his wound almost at all, then he’s stabbed in the neck (big hole that lets out loads of blood), and is still alive to be suspended from a tree, and have sticks poked through his eyes….still twitching at the end of this sequence too….stupid, really really stupid.
I think the budget was around a million quid, seems they spent most of that on the one moment that looked alright i.e. the decapitation. Only problem with that moment is it was ridiculous to assume it would even happen; the Dad having wandered into a run down cottage gets stabbed in the shoulder by a freak child, then instead of getting out of there assumes they might still give him a hand, and walks further into the house and pays for it!!! Dumb. I’ve no idea if the writer and director are Irish, seeing as the movie was shot in the states, but if they are I’ll be very surprised. Who eats corned beef and cabbage SANDWICHES????? I’m not against hillbilly horror set in Ireland, it can work, but this whole premise was just ludicrous. They call it a plague town, but it’s more like a scattering of houses throughout the countryside; it’s a village at best. A plague of what? This is an incest story where the freaks are trying to work out their differences by kidnapping normal girls and making them pregnant. It’s not a plague. Plagues spread, often ending up as pandemics, the symptoms end up killing people – rats and vermin carry them and pass them to humans. None of the girls at the end were sick, they were in a clean home and looked tired more than anything. Their babies were all deformed, but not them. This is just a case of dumb country lovin’.
Had the movie been 10-15 minutes shorter it would at least have been some sort of a victory. As it currently stands, it’s too long, too repetitive and there’s plenty of other horror movies in the vault that do the same kind of thing a lot better.
