Dark
Fields tells an accustomed story: five teens head off to a
concert (band and genre are never specified) and get stranded in the
country along the way. In Texas Chain Saw Massacre fashion,
they encounter a deranged hick (whose motive is only ever hinted at)
who then slaughters 60% of the cast. The editor clearly studied under
the Ed Wood School of Film-Lengthening, as the viewer is forced to
endure long scenes of cars proceeding down roads. With no real twists
or turns in the plot, only holes, what we get is an exceedingly
slow-paced slasher, making seventy minutes feel like three or four
hours. Although the DVD sleeve promises an 80 minute runtime, ten
minutes of this are taken up by a blooper reel interspersed within the
credits. The real bloopers, however, can be found in the film proper,
where boom mikes and camera operators are often quite conspicuous, and
where the teens pay in American currency even though they’re
clearly in Canada.
But
Dark Fields is not totally unwatchable. Unlike the teens in
many other slasher films, the members of this youthful assemblage are
actually sort of likeable. Their accents are painfully Canadian, a
nasally warble thick as maple syrup that turns every “out” into
“oot.” Their vocabulary is filled with an aggressively regional
patois, most notable in their repeated use of the term “ass-clown”
as both noun and verb. Moreover, at least two of the teens are pocked
with terrible acne. The verisimilitude is in-your-face, as these are
not twenty-something Hollywood actors, but rather actual teens from
small-city Canada.
Perhaps
the most appealing of the cast members is Jenna Scott, who plays
Taylor, the quasi-Final Girl. I don’t mean to lean too heavily on
the male gaze in saying so, but she’s undeniably vulpine and, by
the end, almost Valkyrie-esque. Moreover, hers is the apotheosis of a
midriff. A mild spoiler alert is in order here before I
report, with some regret, that there is no nudity in Dark Fields.
Nonetheless, Jenna Scott’s midriff is so singularly lovely and so
focally visible, it almost should count as honorary nudity. Her
perpetually exposed torso may constitute one of the sexiest bare
midriffs in filmic history. I defy all the other more vocal critics
of Dark Fields to find a comelier lower-torso on a horror-film
female lead. On account of that delicious strip of stomach,
Dark Fields endures as a minor horror milestone.
By
virtue of this agreeable cast, when you do make it to the credits and
then sit through the runtime-padding gag reel, you smile and laugh
along with players. Here, after all, are some average teens from an
average place who managed to make a movie. Now, granted, that movie
is far, far below average in quality. But it is still a movie, and no
one can take that away from all parties involved. Perhaps it’s my
own upbringing in rural North Dakota talking (as close as you can get
to Canada without being Canadian, I suppose), but these rosy-cheeked,
foggy-breathed teens remind you of people you went to school with—how
they acquire their own hyper-localized patois and in-jokes, how they
try to do all kinds of things to stave boredom. You feel a certain
nostalgia for the teens in Dark Fields, because they could
have been your friends. Watch the film five or six times, and, indeed, the
cast starts to feel like your friends. Sure, the movie is execrable,
but together, this ragtag, rural ensemble was able to see their
project through, and on an admirably low budget at that. For this
reason, I have no choice but to recommend Dark Fields. It
won’t scare you, it won’t impress you, and it won’t entertain
you, but nonetheless, you just might feel, even for a few fleeting moments, like you’re back with your high school friends trying to go
somewhere. You just might end up smiling.