'The Plague': First-time director's disturbing horror

Charlie Polinger achieves a lot with relatively little with his feature directorial debut, “The Plague.”

- Mark Meszoros, Tribune News Service

Getting a wide release this week, this slice of psychological horror is quite effective despite its small scale and a cast consisting largely of little-known young actors.A cross between “Lord of the Flies” and ... some other movie set at a youth water polo camp, “The Plague” explores, as Polinger puts it in his directorial statement, “the clumsy liminal space between childhood and adolescence, when the id grows too fast and too strong for the conscience to keep up.”

Also the film’s writer, Polinger found inspiration for the story when he unearthed old journals from when he was 12. He read his tales of a youth sports camp, where boys told tall tales of a mysterious “plague” that had infected one unfortunate kid — it was the reason for his acne-covered face and was turning his brain to “mush.”