The Empty Acre (2007)

The Empty Acre (2007)

Directed by: Patrick Rea

Starring: Jennifer Plas, John Wilson, Robert Paisley

I was really on the fence about whether to call this one a horror movie or a drama, because it really has the feel of a drama, but is obviously supposed to be a thriller or something like that. Someone needs to tell writer/director/editor Patrick Rea that you have to have things happen besides a marriage on the rocks to make a horror movie.

A couple that live in the sticks have a baby, and that’s all that’s keeping them together. The man drinks, the woman lives in silent despair and refuses to do anything to try to improve her situation (she’s the main character and we’re supposed to feel sorry for her, but it didn’t really happen that way). One day, their baby gets stolen and they both go even crazier than normal. The woman starts having dreams of a mud baby and finds a dry spot in her field that appears to be crying. I think the idea is that there was a dirt monster or something, but I don’t really have any idea what he was going for.

This is obviously a very cheap movie, but that doesn’t always mean that it has to come out like this indie piece of crap. I mean, the movie opens with stupid editor tricks that’s supposed to suggest that we’re watching a series of home movies (which serves as backstory) interrupted by static, which keeps moving back and forth between the same bits. All it really accomplishes is to tell the audience that they might as well give up now, because the filmmaker obviously doesn’t care about them.

I’d go off more on the story being pointless and nearly existant, but I’m not even sure if what I gathered to be the story was what I was actually supposed to be seeing. There’s a lot put into the fact that the guy drinks (even though it doesn’t seem all that important to anything), and there are a lot of dream sequences that seem like they’d be more at home as a shitty music video for an industrial band in the 90’s. Other than that, the movie’s all about how awful this woman’s life is… which is awful because she just sits around and complains about it. How are you supposed to sympathize with a character who’s just a useless whiner?

Anyway, those’re my thoughts. I wouldn’t recommend this movie, or any of the other twenty movies written/directed by this Patrick Rea guy (though I haven’t seen them), just solely because he obviously doesn’t care about story or his audience. Not that those are important parts of film or anything. Daddy issues are way more important.