'How To Survive' is yet another horror story

"How To Survive a Plague" is yet another horror story built around found footage, but one well worth seeing.

The horror is all too real, the footage culled from insider video accounts of two decades of Act Up activism - beginning in 1981, when the number of AIDS cases in New York City was reported at 41, to the arrival of effective anti-viral drugs in the mid-1990s, by which time the death toll had topped one million worldwide.

"Plague" is unflinching look at the activists' mistakes and acheivements, their regrets, their very solemn pride at a victory attained at so high a cost.

The David France documentary traces the origins of Act Up to the onset of the "gay cancer," when reaction to this unknown and terrifying enemy first took the form of frantic protest - a demand for basic services, access to hospitals (many refused to admits AIDS patients).

"Plague" shows how the early movement favored passion over organization, and how this changed when a volunteer medical researchers advised Act Up leaders to engage drug companies and federal health officials in productive, informed debate about targeted research.

This led to an "elite" group of Act Up members taking the lead in a campaign to badger and ultimately team up with organizations like the National Institutes of Health and with companies like Merck, which was working on cutting-edge protease inhibitors.

Rank-and-file Act Up members came to resent this top-down approach, and there are frank depictions in "Plague" of the angry divisions within the organization.

There are also candid confessions among Act Up leaders about the arguable waste of time, money and energy during early years pursuing less effective drugs.

Their attitude - humility - is one of the most compelling aspects of "Plague." Perhaps because the activists seem to downplay the monumental obstacles in front of them - there was no roadmap. They had to draw it from scratch, to improvise, to adapt. Perhaps too because the intersection of humility and competence seen in these activists seems to be in such short supply in our country, even in the face of far less deadly and less daunting challenges.

Contact movie critic Gary Thompson at 215-854-5992 or thompsg@phillynews.com. Read his blog at philly.com/KeepItReel.