Escape the Field: Or How I Learned to Accept Stage 2 as the Formula of Substandard Horror Pictures

Escape the Field (2022)

Today I thought I would discuss something that irks me to no end which is a common horror movie trop, but first I will give a quick review of this run of the mill b movie knock off of the likes of Cube, Saw, Escape Room, and so many others. Boasting an almost entirely underwhelming cast aside from the great Theo Rossi, who many will know from playing Juice on Sons of Anarchy, all of the characters in this film are insufferable and never do a thing to make themselves stand out so as to be worth paying attention to. Jordan Claire Robbins, the lead actress of the film, is one of the most bland horror movie heroines that I can remember. It is not a good statement that the most memorable character in the movie was the corn.

Technically speaking the poor CGI is somewhat forgivable given the fun corn field setting but in a movie set in such a simple location it is hard to fathom why so much of the movie looked as if it was shot in front of a greenscreen.

In taking about the setting I wanted to mention the jarring fashion with which the movie starts where all the principal characters already know that they are trapped instead of the field instead of trying to leave before coming to the realization that they are trapped. To me this plot structure felt like putting the cart ahead of the horse, not to mention that having the viewers see the characters struggle to escape and come to learn the reality of their situation would have made it easier to root for them as opposed to starting in the middle of the story without properly introducing the audience to who they are supposed to care about .

The plot also becomes incredibly scrambled toward the end with characters seemingly disappearing and/or being introduced to random new elements after an hour of barely anything happening. I wish the film had taken advantage of the time loop storyline which appeared to have been set up earlier in the movie when a stranger emerged from the cornfield claiming to be experiencing the same events over again as this would have been an interesting and frightening turn of events, but the movie never did.

All of these criticisms aside, the movie, which is a low budget horror picture, is actually decent enough for the first hour or so with a simple premise just good enough to keep the viewer engaged. However, all is for not when in the third act the filmmakers resorted to the dead horse horror trope ending where the survivors must enter stage 2 of some grand conspiracy. Before the movie even began I feared that the movie would go this route as so many other movies of this sort have gone this way including The Killing Room (2009), The Belko Experiment (2016), Escape Room (2019), and many others. It has gotten to the point that I am fearful of investing my time in these kinds of films as there is nothing more unsatisfying that watching an hour and half story just to be left with no conclusion to the story as the surviving cast are forced to start the story all over again. While this may have been an interesting conclusion to one of these movies it has become an easy solution for incompetent filmmakers unsure of how to conclude their story. My blood was boiling when this movie ended and yet again I had to suffer through the the incompetence of a stage 2 ending. For these reasons I put Phillip Seymour Hoffman's amazing outburst in the movie Punch Drunk Love on the side to showcase how this movie made me feel at the end.

There are probably worse ways to spend your time than this movie though, it is just this all too familiar stage 2 ending that has become far to commonplace for my liking that gets under my skin. If you enjoy the films I mentioned above with characters trapped in a maze they cannot escape you may enjoy this though the ending will surely leave you wanting. Still, the journey may make up for the ending, but for me it did not.

Here is the trailer for Escape the Field: