Fertile Ground Review

• 31st May 2011

After a tragic miscarriage leaves her unable to have children Emily Weaver (Leisha Hailey, The L Word) and her artist husband Nate (Gale Harold, Hellcats, Desperate Housewives) move to Nate’s isolated ancestral home to start afresh. However, they soon discover their idyllic country house has a gruesome history and it’s not long before the ghosts that haunt the house start effecting both Emily and Nate in different and disturbing ways.

This film was extremely creepy at times, gory at others and often downright frustrating. Both Hailey and Harold produce good performances with the material they’re given, Hailey as the scared, vulnerable wife and Harold as a man whose kind personality is slowly being obliterated by something much darker. However, it was frustrating that husband and wife never seemed to communicate with each other in a way that you would expect, given how they’re presented at the beginning of the film. And Emily is a weak character, lacking the feisty survival instincts which make for a good horror heroine. Laurie Strode would be less than impressed.

There were a lot of questions raised throughout the film which were never fully addressed, the main point of contention being that it was made very clear that the house was plagued by disasters but the reasons why were never fully revealed. Without this explanation the ghost story falls flat.  The finale simply raises more questions; to refer to it as a “twist” would be generous. This film borrowed elements from a lot of the greats (The Amityville Horror, Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining) but this only serves to highlight its own failures. The mini-titles throughout the film did little to improve its credibility.

This isn’t the worst horror film ever made, but in this specific genre that’s hardly a complimentary comment. There were some genuinely tense and creepy moments but overall it managed to be both predictable and confused, as if the director was never entirely sure which way he wanted to go with the film. You suspect that many scenes were left on the cutting room floor. This film had potential but it never came to fruition. If you want to watch a sub-standard horror film about a scary house and the effect it has on its tenants I’d dust off a copy of The Amityville Horror II. Because even that is better than this.

Lindsay Emerson