Ten years pass. All children born since that terrible day are afflicted with the same condition. The high schools empty out of the last healthy generation. Recent graduates face a rosy economic future, with little competition for available jobs. But school gymnasiums have been converted to hospital wards where nurses feed and clean the comatose kiddies; a few determined parents have given up their lives to caring for their progeny, and the governments of the world are talking about outlawing childbirth, rather than add to the millions who seem to face no future beyond being spoonfed and staring at the ceiling. Some kids just over the affected age live a troubled and traumatized life, breaking into homes in their doomed determination to make contact with their afflicted peers.

Tom Russell (Van Der Beek) returns from prison 10 years after killing a man in a bar fight, carrying a tattered copy of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Much is made of his affinity for this book; he recommends it to others, talks about what it means to him and ultimately abandons it to appear in the film's very last shot, leaving us to ponder the overemphasis of this one literary reference. Hmmm. Tom. Bar fight. Returning from prison. Steinbeck. Oooh. We get it. He's supposed to be this film's Tom Joad. Wow, that's deep.

Alas, the character-based first third of the film, which works precisely because it's so disturbing and different, soon gives way to familiarity as the lost generation sits up and starts killing people. So what we have, essentially, is Night of the Dead Living: The Rugrats, complete with venerable dialogue like "That's not your daughter anymore" and "Once we get over the bridge, we should have a clear shot all the way to the Air Force base." Indeed, much of what follows is a small band of survivors being stalked by their erstwhile loved ones in the corridors of an abandoned small-town high school while fighting back with firearms. That slow hiss is the air rapidly going out a movie that had promised something other than more of the same.

A film that should have tried harder

Van Der Beek is as unremarkable as the movie itself becomes, but the same can't be said of some of his co-stars. Ivana Milicevic, who plays Tom's embittered ex-wife, Jean, is both beautiful and intense in all the right ways for the material. Dee Wallace cannot help remind viewers of better movies, but she's effective enough for the short period of time she's onscreen.

Still, the creative laziness here verges on the criminal. You have a powerful and disturbing opening concept like that, worthy of John Wyndham or Nigel Kneale at their best, and a cheap zombie rehash is the best you can do with it? Then get another job. Seriously, it doesn't take all that much thought to come up with half a dozen alternative story directions, all far more promising than just having the blank-eyed kids wake up and start killing people. Here's just a few:

What if one kid came out of the coma and became the subject of too much attention by too many adults projecting all their heartbreak and loss upon him? What if the plague ended and the new influx of bright, happy and unaffected kids entered a world now facing the problem of what to do with all those millions still rotting away in high-school gymnasiums? What if the kids came back fully recovered but slightly off, leaving their parents to the dawning knowledge that their darlings were hiding something? What if we followed the life paths of the last high-school class as they moved on into adulthood, enjoying the status that has accrued to the last of their kind but increasingly aware that they can leave nothing in their wake but oblivion and extinction? Hell, what if the story turned out to be entirely about adults struggling for a reason to live in a world with no future?

Honestly, people: those questions—each more promising than the story's actual direction—represent a mere 30 seconds of brainstorming by a reviewer dizzy with a flu who needed chicken soup just to think straight. This movie comes attached to the name of one of the most imaginative, uncompromising fantasists of his era. The available evidence doesn't specify whether Barker (here given a producer credit) contributed more than his valuable byline, but either way, you don't need a talent of his scale to come up with warmed-over Romero fueled by genre clichés like the jump-out-and-say-boo scares of indistinct, out-of-focus figures sliding into frame behind protagonists who think they're safe. Everybody involved should have tried harder. As it is, The Plague is disposable junk.