Escape the Field is a mash-up film… an amalgamation of ideas that circulate around a low budget, low effort location. It’s Cube if the cube was a corn field. It’s Escape Room if the room was a corn field. It’s In the Tall Grass if… umm… if the tall grass was replaced by tall corn. I guess there’s some Signs or possibly Children of the Corn here too. Or Maze Runner even. Toss it all in! Why not!

The film is about a bunch of random people who wake up in a corn field without any idea how they got there. Each person has an item that can help them out… a gun, a lamp, matches, etc. They have to learn to trust and work together to solve puzzles, avoid traps, and maybe deal with a monster hunting them.

This movie is underwritten and involves leaps of logic that would make Burt Ward embarrassed (holy corn maze, Batman!). There’s all sorts of things these blundering idiots don’t do to help them survive… like walk a fence-line, investigate creepy scarecrows, climb a tree, or just stand on each other’s shoulders. Enough “hey why don’t you just-” moments that you start to realize the screenwriter hadn’t thought through the implications of these corn-y mysteries.

Despite these many, many flaws, I was still pretty engaged with the movie for the first hour. It had problems, but it was engaging bit of pulp thriller/horror. But it gets to a point where you just can’t keep forgiving blundering idiocy, bad writing, iffy acting, and leaps in logic. The movie started to fall apart… and it wasn’t even tightly put together in the first place. Add to that a thundering nothingburger of an ending and smash to credits. It left me unsatisfied even if I could have predicted the non-answer ending going in.

This movie had potential and it’s possible you could have fun with it if you like pulpy thrills. If you like Escape Room scenarios based on corn. Or if you have fond memories of Cube and wished it had substituted math for corn. And who hasn’t wanted that? It’s corn all the way down, baby!

Score: 74