Dark Fields (DVD)

A group of teens who run out of gas on their way to a rock concert (in the middle of nowhere, of course) and have to walk to the nearest big, creepy house for help. This sort of story is so spent by now that it probably could've been written and directed by elemantary kids.

There's a "YAWN" feeling about the whole thing, beginning with a script that rehashes familiar elements from TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (teens on their way to a rock concert try to bum gas at an isolated farmhouse and end up being slaughtered by an inbred. Same theme as every other slasher flick with teens being stalked by an unstoppable killer. The elements are there, nothing interesting or exciting is done with them. Once the premise is established, it horribly DRAGS with a lot of creeping around the dark searching for the nerd Drew. There's like 40 freaking minutes of 'Drew, where are you?" The movie should have been called 'The Search For Drew'. Drew looks for gas and is never seen again. Lots of screaming.

DARK FIELDS has Farmer Brown, a pudgy guy in overalls who has long hair hanging over his face. A rip off from 'Lake Dead' and the 'Twin Killers' (Lake Dead was garbage too - See my review!)As a slasher character, he barely registers. The teenagers run around from one building to the next, through "dark fields", but wherever they try to hide, Farmer Brown pops up and they start screaming again. Now and then they get lucky and manage to whack him over the head with a shovel or impale him with something, but he just keeps coming, even though there's nothing supernatural about him. There's nothing interesting or scary about him, either--he's just plain old Farmer Brown.

Gorehounds will be disappointed. A side from some spurting blood and a brief shot of a severed limb, there's very little carnage and none of the "creative deaths" that sometimes make even the worst of this genre worth watching for fans of such stuff. One character's demise isn't even shown--he just disappears, which is what leads everyone else to wander around the dark farmhouse and surrounding buildings looking for him in the first place. For a "body count" flick, that's a wasted opportunity. And there's no nudity, either, except for a shot of one of the guys with his butt cheeks pressed against the window of a station wagon. Yikes.

Farmer Brown's motivations aren't even that interesting--when he was a kid, his family was ravaged by bad guys who showed up at the farm one day to ask for some gas, so now he hangs around the crumbling old home place and kills anybody else who comes around asking for gas. Why doesn't he just open up a gas station?

The teenagers cast are the usual: pretty girl, Taylor; the handsome jock, Josh (Eric Phillion), who takes time out from searching for their missing friend to have a romantic interlude with Taylor in the hayloft; the sex-starved couple, Zack and Justine, who can't keep their hands off of each other; and the nerd, Drew, who is included only because nobody else in the group had access to the family car that night. Jenna Scott ("Taylor") is pretty cute, and she's in almost every scene, which is about the only reason I had to stay with this movie till the end. Josh is a likable enough character too, but as for the rest of them, I couldn't wait for the killings to begin, which doesn't happen until about halfway through, and, as mentioned before, they're pretty mild. No nudity which this film needed! Jenna Scott's the only thing good. 'D+'