Texas Killing Fields (2011)

Plot: While trying to crack a murder in small-town Texas, local homicide detective Souder and his former New York City cop partner Heigh find themselves pulled into a case involving a serial killer who dumps his victims bodies in the “Texas Killing Fields”. Based on a true story.

My Review: I went into it expecting a straight up serial killer sort of movie with the cops chasing the killer. Sort of like a “Seven” film. This movie is nothing like that. I also expected it to be decent if not good because of known actors being in it. Nope, it wasn’t. I did NOT like this movie….at all.

I’m not going to give you a plot breakdown like I normally do with my other movies, because well, this movie was hard to follow. (The plot description above should be enough) I’m not sure if it was poor editing, or poor writing, but the movie jumped around a lot between different places, and characters that we knew nothing about. It felt like the viewers were plopped into a case in the middle of it and were left to figure out what was going on ourselves based on some newspapers up on a wall. I thought perhaps because I was bored with the movie, and the sound was so low for some of the actors that I was just missing stuff from lack of interest, but my husband  agreed with me, and from reading other reviews I see other people had the same issues we did.

One moment the cops were talking about one victim and the next they were speaking of someone totally different like we knew who they were taking about. In the next part they’d be at some location like we were supposed to know what was going on. They’d name some of the victims but not others and then later talk about completely different ones like we had a clue who they were and what was going on. The movie is like this dozens of times from start to finish.

I had some problems with the killer because quite frankly its never explained who the hell the guy is or why he’s doing what he’s doing, and why he’s getting help from it. It also never goes on to explain how one of the suspects was involved with some evidence, but turned out not to be the killer. From looking at some of the newspaper pieces on the wall I could have sworn I saw that it said over 50 bodies had been dumped at the “killing fields” from the 1970s. Well based on the movie, and the clipping I figured they were supposed to be tied together. Based on the killers age, that’s doubtful. Again something not explained.

Gore/FX: Couple dead bodies here and there, nothing graphic.

Sexual Content: Nada.

Acting: The acting was decent. Nothing wrong with it that I saw. I really like Jeffery Dean Morgan, but even he couldn’t save it.

Overall: Had this been a cut and dry cat and mouse chase with cops vs. serial killer it would have been a decent movie. But all the bouncing around and not making much sense made this brutal to watch even with the decent acting and budget. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t bother with this one.

My Rating: