I’ll say for this in defense of Unearth: it’s different.  It’s a horror film that isn’t horrifying until the final ten minutes or so, and then the tonal shift of the material is so drastic that it seems to be from a different movie entirely.  Actually, that’s not really a good thing.

John C. Lyons and Dorota Swiss’ film tells a fairly conventional farming failure story; two families with neighboring farms are simply not making any money anymore.  One family chooses to lease their land to a gas and oil company drilling operation, which disgusts the other family.  Time passes and encounters between the two families are infrequent but occasionally quite passionate.  And then, when things begin to seem really desperate for these ordinary people, whatever it is that the drilling operation (fracking) has unleashed begins to take effect.  On everyone.

It’s a wacky, but not ridiculous, premise.  It is certainly possible that drilling could encounter some toxic or poison element that we have yet to experience.  On the other hand, what happens to Kathryn Dolan (Adrienne Barbeau) and her family is hard to fathom, or believe.  Remember Slithis, the monster derived from pollution, back in 1977?  No?  Well, it’s kind of like that, in a more flowery way.

As a drama about the difficulties of modern farming, this is probably a two star movie.  But once the horror blooms, so late in the story, and completely changes everything, this movie descends into its own madness.  It’s too bad.  ☆ 1/2.  30 September 2021.