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Home | Film Review: Field Freak (2014)

Film Review: Field Freak (2014)

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SYNOPSIS:

A family moves into a secluded cabin only to be terrorized by a mysterious creature.

REVIEW:

I watched a movie called Field Freak and I don’t know what to write about it. I thought the perfect way to start my review would be to tell everyone reading it that I wasn’t sure what would be coming out of my mind and through my fingers. What you are reading was not pre-determined in any way whatsoever. It is simply what I am going to write about Field Freak, as I think about the movie. So if it isn’t cohesive or linear, I am sorry. I just don’t know what I can write about the movie since watching the movie only jumbled up my mind.

Field Freak is a movie with a release date that I cannot find. It is supposed to get released this year, 2014, but I do not know what time of year the release is or was. That only matters for those of you out there who want to watch the movie. I am going to assume that most of you won’t, so it doesn’t really matter. The movie tells the story of a family that moves from Chicago to the country, where they are tormented by a monster called the field freak. Charles Bear (Dave Juehring) is the patriarch of the family, who moved them out there in order to write his next novel. His wife Linda (Trena Penson) is the primary target of the field freak. His son Lonnie (Tristan Coppola) is pretty much a non-factor in the attacks.

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My basic thought after finishing Field Freak is that I’m not sure whether it was terrible intentionally or unintentionally. Everything was terrible about the movie. I don’t know if director Stephen Folker had set out to make one of the worst movies in existence or if it just happened while he was making it. I mean, everything about it was pretty bad. I admire the way that everything was bad. It is sort of endearing to think that someone may have set out with the intention of combining all the worst parts of a movie to make the worst movie that they could. The problem with Field Freak is that even with all of this bad, there is little to no entertainment value.

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Let me start with the casting and acting. Dave Juehring seems like the oddest casting of a hero that I have ever seen in a movie. He looks so much like an office working dad that it is hard to believe him as the kick ass guy that we’re expecting the character to be throughout the movie. Having him play Charles Bear seems like some fairly big miscasting. But the performances are what really stand out in the movie, and not in a good way. Every one of the actors is bland and delivers their lines so flatly that it deflates the whole movie. They seem more whiney than afraid, or they don’t seem to have any emotion at all. It works against the tension that is being built through the field freak attacks.

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Then there is the field freak itself. The name alone sounds kind of dumb. If you have a monster, you can surely think up a better name for it than field freak. Aside from that, the look of the creature is pretty bad. It looks like a guy dressed in a lower end Halloween costume of some sort of ape. Unrealistic fur, horrible mask, weird looking chest… That kind of stuff. It looks so fake that it can’t be taken seriously as a threat. It seems like a person in a monster suit rather than an actual monster. And not just any person in a suit. A person that is slightly less mobile because they are wearing the suit.

Finally, we have the really odd writing of Field Freak. There are story beats throughout Field Freak which seem super strange, or downright inappropriate for the movie. There are moments such as one in which Ned Perkins (Glenn Harston) is selling homemade root beer out of a tub in his yard that make me wonder what Stephen Folker was thinking when he wrote the movie. And there is a really inappropriate moment when Lonnie talks about hearing the monster the night before, and mimics the sex sounds of his parents. Moments like these occur throughout the movie. I think they were intentionally included to provide humor, but they only made me wonder why they were even thought up at all.

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I think I have come to the conclusion that Field Freak is a movie intentionally made to be bad. Sometimes that kind of thing can be a lot of fun. But in the case of Field Freak, it was not entertaining at all. When movies are made to be entertainment, the lack of that value is detrimental to the success of the specific movie. A movie that is intentionally bad but lacks entertainment is a movie that shouldn’t be made. Field Freak is one of those movies.

4 comments

  1. This comment is regarding the author of this review. Jesse. I’ve read almost all of your reviews and I love your writing style. I get it. You have the ability to write exactly what I’m thinking. I’m curious. Are you male or female?

     
    • I’m two years late on this because I don’t normally read the comments on the reviews. To answer your question way later than you asked it, I’m male.

       
  2. I’m going to try.to keep up with your reviews as I like how u did this one. I’m 1/2 way through field freak and feel exactly how u have described your experience of watching this film. I also have nothing good to say about this movie and.looked.for 1 from u, and found it, only credit from u was the meant to make a terrible movie in every aspect, my only credit would be in think they placed their music. And that’s all.. save ur night people and don’t watch this.. I give it a 10 in waste of time and a dollar

     
  3. John Ettlinger

    I watched most of the movie (Field Freak ) and I thought not only was it some of the worst acting I’ve seen , but also some of the worst writing I’ve seen for a movie. Until I looked it up I swore that it was made by film students. One of the worst parts of the film was believing that anybody could be dumb enough to believe in rabid beaver attacks. I thought to myself nobody can be this dumb. It was so annoying I couldn’t finish the film anytime the pest control guy opened his mouth I wanted to punch his teeth down his throat. Absolutely the second worst movie I’ve ever seen.

    John
    Ettlinger

     

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