I have to admit, when I first got hands on Dark Fields from Entertainment One, who sent out a copy for me to review, I was skeptical. It reminded me of a movie I’d seen years prior, called Slash, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s seeing a movie that I’ve already seen. But thankfully, my early opinion was quickly turned around, and I got a look at what Dark Fields really was.

Dark Fields takes us out to the little town of Perseverance, a largely farming community that’s seen better days. Not to mention wetter days–Perseverance is in the middle of a drought. So they turn where farming communities in horror movies have traditionally turned in drought–not to prayer, or cloud seeding, but to human sacrifice.  And when this starts a series of horrors for the residents of Perseverance, ending in a mysterious affliction for one of their residents, they’re going to have to do something even they didn’t think they’d have to do, and for people willing to kill people for rain, you know it’s got to be pretty bad.

Dark Fields is, not to put too fine a point on it, deliciously creepy stuff. It’s a whole lot more ominous than you might expect, largely owing to the fact that, most of the time, there’s a thunderstorm going on somewhere in the background. There’s nothing more creepy than a thunderstorm, I say; the great punch that is nature running amok in the background, when at any time a bolt of pure electricity might slice down from on high and incinerate anything it happens to touch. And then follow it up with a scream of primal triumph in a rumble of thunder.

It does suffer a bit under the weight of its own ambition; Dark Fields weighs in at right around two hours, and it really didn’t need that much runtime. There’s a lot of superfluous extra stuff that easily could have been dropped off here, as well as plenty of bits that I wonder why they even made it in in the first place.

That’s the worst of it, frankly–it’s deliciously creepy in its opening minutes, but it spends so much time on pointless superfluities that it ends up killing the very buzz that it helped to create. It wears out its own welcome after a while, and frankly, that’s a shame. That’s a profoundly deep shame. Because this was some great stuff when it got started; I only wish it could have held on and been good all the way to the end.

Speaking of which, the ending will kind of boil off into this strange block of nonsense–if you look at it too closely, like I did, you’ll break down and start screaming at your television about how preposterous the whole thing is.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives Dark Fields a six out of ten. It started out great, but just couldn’t hold on to that initial creepy long enough to finish the job. And that’s a shame, too, because this was some pretty good stuff. At least, halfway good stuff.