No one will believe what young, imaginative Joshua Ormond is about to find in THE FIELDS.
spelt out onscreen, and there are some delightful character bits early on by witnesses Lester Allen and Lela Bliss. Mitchell is enjoy- ably guff and wily, Ayres not par- ticularly persuasive as the lemon-drop-sucking double Romeo, but De Havilland is a pleasure to watch, slowly turning on the Barbara Stanwyck in her performance as murderous im- pulses rise to the top. The penultimate release of the shortlived production company International Pictures, THE DARK MIRROR is presented in a 1.37:1 rendering on par with TCM/ Universal’s recent PHANTOM LADY: quite acceptable but hardly outstanding.
THE FIELDS
2012, Breaking Glass Pictures, 98m 50s, $11.99, DVD By Kim Newman
Directed by Tom Mattera and
David Mazzoni (THE 4TH DI- MENSION) and scripted by Harrison Smith, THE FIELDS is
6
a slow-burning drama that hints at horrors it doesn’t quite deliver. In 1973, in rural Pennsylvania, Bonnie (ALONE IN THE DARK’s Tara Reid) reaches breaking point when her husband Barry (Faust Checho) threatens her with a gun. She takes their moon-faced 8-year-old son Steven (Joshua Ormond) to stay with his grandparents Gladys (Cloris Leachman) and Hiney (DRACULA’S WIDOW’s Bev Appleton) on an out-of-the- way farm. Steven is a devoted Godzilla fan, but disturbed by news coverage of the Manson trial, which he only half-under- stands. The presence of local hippies camped out in an aban- doned funfair and a sense of something wicked in the corn gives the kid strange ideas, which means that, when he reports find- ing a corpse in a forbidden field, no one takes him seriously. This is slightly too square in its morality to be really disturb- ing or affecting—through it all, monster kid Steven remains an
innocent, loving Godzilla and ter- rified of Manson. STAND BY ME or LADY IN WHITE suggest a child’s commingled dread of (and fascination with) adult horrors and the possibility that their young protagonist might grow up to be monsters too. Steven shows none of that dark side; he isn’t even erotically intrigued by the Manson girls. Sympathetic to its troubled parents, who do fi- nally unite to support their son, the film most comes to life when veterans Leachman and Appleton share the screen—credibly spiky, hidebound by prejudice but warm and crude, the old-timers feel much more real as characters than the young ‘uns, and the mild suspense only really kicks in when they are imperilled. Ambitious to be more char- acter study than horror film, THE FIELDS is disappointingly light- weight in its terrors. The sugges- tive build-up makes good use of the ominous cornfield and amusement park locations and Steven is exposed to some
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