Sommerleigh Pollonais, Senior Writer
What do you get when you combine escape room shenanigans with a cornfield? Well that’s the basic premise of Escape the Field, or at least it’s one of them as this movie pulls from so many sub-genres of horror/thriller, it doesn’t know its corn husk from its kernels.
The opening starts with an oldie but a goodie where a woman named Sam (Jordan Claire Robbins from The Umbrella Academy) wakes up in a cornfield, unsure of how she got there. The only thing she has is a gun with a strange symbol etched on it. She soon discovers another stranger named Tyler (Theo Rossi from Luke Cage) who also claims to have awoken with no memory of how he got there and nothing on him except a box of matches, which also has a strange symbol on it.
They reluctantly (and predictably) team up and come across other people who have the same story, each of them also having an item that may or may not be important. And they decide to work together to get out of the giant cornfield but they quickly discover there’s something in the corn with them, something that may not be human.
Sounds like a blast right? Alas no, as Escape the Field tries to be so many different things horror-wise, this fun premise is ultimately wasted. What seems like a supernatural story similar to 2019’s In The Tall Grass takes a left turn straight into Escape Room territory. This might not have been a bad thing if the film didn’t try so hard to be “complex”. Writer/director Emerson Moore wants to keep you guessing but the problem with this is we already know there’s nothing supernatural going on, so holding on to that particular thread for too long dragged everything else down.
Then there’s the group of actors. It’s not that any of them are bad in their roles; quite the opposite really. But the story splits them up during the middle act and we lose track of most of them until the final arc. How am I supposed to care about anyone besides Sam and Tyler if they disappear for half the movie?
And then there’s the ending. The Crazies did it better. That’s all I’ll say about that. Escape the Field has a solid premise and the visuals are great too. I like the concept but the pacing is terrible, the tone is uneven, and two thirds of the cast are completely wasted. If they do decide to follow this up with a sequel, I hope they remember, corn pops best on an even heat. Pack too much in there and you’ll end up with a bunch of uncooked kernels, and nobody wants that.
Sommer’s Score: 4.5 out of 10
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Sommerleigh of the House Pollonais. First of Her Name. Sushi Lover, Queen of Horror Movies, Comic Books and Binge Watching Netflix. Mother of two beautiful black cats named Vader and Kylo. I think eating Popcorn at the movies should be mandatory, PS4 makes the best games ever, and I’ll be talking about movies until the zombie apocalypse comes.
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