A creepy premise and a couple of memorable visual hooks highlight this first theatrical release from Dark Sky Films. The label, best known for its offbeat, hard-to-find horror and exploitation titles, has moved in recent times to original productions. Plague Town, which saw a limited theatrical run that ended only in the past couple of weeks, is a film that feels like a “Dark Sky title”: weird, uncompromising and full of original touches. Unfortunately, these qualities are somewhat marred by the film’s own over-confidence: it delivers the goods, for sure, but it thinks it’s delivering them more often, and with greater impact, than what I, for one, actually experienced.

After an intense prologue sequence that features hints of religious and psychosexual twistedness, we move into fairly standard horror territory. Travelers to Ireland find themselves in a remote, rural community where we already know, from the prologue, that something is seriously wrong with the babies. Then we learn that something is seriously wrong with large segments of the adult, or at least the adolescent, population as well. And the normal folks, meaning those that aren’t monstrous themselves, range between the mildly murderous to the frighteningly loony, the latter being “enablers” of the crazed monster-people. (I’m being somewhat vague because there’s a bit of a mystery in director/co-writer David Gregory’s story as to the exact nature of the titular “plague” and its cause.)

All in all, it’s a nice oddball stew to drop our Americans (and one Brit) into: unpredictable, and with a palpable atmosphere of dread. The problem, though, is that it takes a little too long to drop them there and put these audience-surrogates through their paces. We get too many shrill domestic squabbles and expository exchanges before the action proper starts. When it does, there’s a lot of B-movie violence, some excellent exterior cinematography, and even a memorable scene of creepy eroticism—memorable because the content is so un-explicit and involves the central monster.

However, all of these individual pieces don’t really coalesce into a powerful narrative. For example, we’re told several times that the lead, played well by Josslyn DeCrosta, has suffered from emotional/mental challenges in the past, so I kept waiting for these to play an important part in the plot. And the finale, which I think is intended to represent some kind of mind-scrambling twist, didn’t do much for me. The result is an occasionally exciting and even outright disturbing middle section, but that’s about it. Still, as a home video release, Plague Town is worth checking out if you’re a fan of the “weird family” subgenre as typified by The Hills Have Eyes movies or Frontière(s).