Fertile Ground (AD Originals)
| release date | January 28 2011 |
| studio | After Dark Films |
| director | Adam Gierasch |
| writer | Adam Gierasch, Jace Anderson |
| starring | Gale Harold, Leisha Hailey, Jami Bassman, JoNell Kennedy |
| tagline | From Cradle to Grave. |
| site | afterdarkoriginals.com |
1 Comments
Good start, but slowly disintegrated as the movie progressed. It felt like they had too many ideas and none of them were explained fully, not to mention that the ending was extremely disappointing. Good for some jumps, but overall just a jumble.
An frequently scary and jolting haunted house/possession flick with decent performances but miscasted leads that had no chemistry to make you care about their relationship. The atmoshere was perfect with a creaky, old and spooky house in the middle of nowhere that supposably is where serial killer H.H Holmes stayed at which makes the setting even more startling. The plot is very unoriginal and spoon feeds it to the viewers and actual has chapter titles for peep sakes, I mean did we really need those! The story follows a couple who is trying to move on after a miscarriage and moves into a old but spacious house that belonged to the husbands ancestors, then strange and spooky things start to happen, pretty much a been there, seen that story. The movie is a cross between Amityville Horror and Conjurer and it’s soo much like your average haunted house flick that I’m starting to forget about it as of now, it’s becoming a tired rehash not reboot for the genre but definitely more polished than most straight to dvd haunted house flicks, that’s not saying much though. The ending was unclear to me because it never clarified anything and it makes you believe that the wife was just crazy the whole time or was it the house I just don’t know. Overall it has decent scares a committed performance from the lead actress but there is nothing new or inventive here just a run of the mill horror movie to gain a buck but at that it’s not half bad but not great either. Wait for television. More of a 5.5 out of 10
Descent, very slow paced though.
For the sake of brevity, I will start by saying that Fertile Ground joins the ranks of the really bad After Dark films. This movie seemed like more of a Lifetime made for television movie than a real horror film.
The always cute Leisha Hailey leads the cast in this tale of a young artsy, married couple moving away from the city after she suffers a tragic miscarriage. They move well out into the country in an old farmhouse. Shortly after discovering some items belonging to the previous owners, the wife begins seeing things. Her husband begins to get secretive and he always seems to be angry and seconds away from exploding at her. When she becomes pregnant again and learns the true history of this house, she begins to wonder if she or her baby will ever escape the curse of the place.
My description above was far more interesting than the movie replaced here. There have simply been too many similar ghost styled movies with similar plots done out there today. While not necessarily a problem, those movies simply did a far better job of telling this particular story. Put simply, nothing about Fertile Ground was scary or intense. The performances were okay, but the writing, pacing and set pieces were just poorly put together and ultimately predictable.
Perhaps if the characters had been better introduced, we might have been presented with a reason to care about what was happening to them. There was simply nothing especially relate-able about the husband and wife which caused me to become invested in them.
Fertile ground fails as a horror film and mostly fails as a thriller or drama as well. Steer clear if you can, as there are better After Dark Originals out there.