Movie Review: Escape from Cannibal Farm (2017)
Escape From Cannibal Farm is a horror film from writer/director Charlie Steeds. It is about a family who is going out to the countryside on a camping trip, and find out that their trip is going to involve a cannibal farm instead.
The first thing we noticed here was the similarity between this film and the way The Hills Have Eyes (2006) starts off. In that film a family is also out in a camper, get to the middle of nowhere where the camper breaks down and camp there. Then are attacked by mutants instead of cannibals. The synopsis is pretty similar. Not sure if this was somewhat of a tribute, but it was pretty close. There is kind of a side plot going on about how a kid gets terribly burned, and the father is now wanting justice, but none of the plot seemed to add up. At one point it seems like some kind of Leatherface situation, there is a twist that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the characters in general just act completely odd in certain situations.
With that being said, this can be attributed to the writing. Most of the film doesn’t follow what the title would imply, and we couldn’t tell how serious the film was trying to be. The actors were taking their performances very seriously and did a great job for most having little prior experience, but the overall tone of the film itself seemed to bounce back and forth between serious, and campy. There were some decent practical effects from time-to-time, but overall the cannibal part of this film was lacking. When you see “Cannibal Farm” in the title, it implies that you are going to see some kind of crazy cannibalistic killer stuff. In this case, it was few and far between. The cinematography was decent, though, and there were some nice shots here and there.
Overall, Escape From Cannibal Farm is the second effort from Charlie Steeds in the writing/directing department. It’s not uncommon to see the writing and directing done by the same person in indie films, and it works for some, but having reviewed a lot of indie films, pulling double-duty on both can sometimes be detrimental to the overall completed project as they have a specific vision that makes sense to them, but might not work out so well on screen, but also being the director can cloud having an objective view. In this case, the film seemed to have somewhat of an identity crisis of sorts, and it was hard to tell how serious it wanted to be. If it was supposed to be 100% serious, it wasn’t. If it was intentionally supposed to be cheesy, it wasn’t. It also had a running time of 1h 40min, and a lot of the film was slow and it felt like it was too long. There were a couple of points where we thought it was going to be over but continued on. We are going to have to say that while we don’t recommend this film, we also think that Steeds still has some growing to do in filmmaking, and this wasn’t terrible for a second attempt. It looks like he has three more projects on the horizon, and we will definitely check them out.
