Strange Harvest (2024) Review
Directed and written by Stuart Ortiz (GRAVE ENCOUNTERS), STRANGE HARVEST will be available on Digital Download across the UK from 27th October and Australia from 29th October. The film stars Peter Zizzo, Terri Apple, Andy Lauer, Matthew Peschio, Janna Cardia, Thomas Wolfe Jr, Tim Sherburne, Christina Helene Bra, and LA Williams.
A routine welfare check in the San Bernardino suburbs leads to a gruesome discovery – a family of three has been bound, bled, and posed below a strange symbol written in blood on the ceiling. Detectives Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Lexi Taylor (Terri Apple) recognize the symbol as the calling card of a killer from 15 years earlier who has seemingly returned to continue his murder spree.
It is not long before ‘Mr. Shiny’ begins leaving horrifying new crime scenes in his wake, one victim is trapped in a swimming pool with live leeches while another is ritualistically flayed and displayed in a public park. It soon becomes evident the case is anything but routine and that the murders, and their perpetrator, may be part of some sinister, otherworldly agenda involving cosmic phenomena and evil forces from beyond.
Stuart Ortiz, who co-directed 2014’s GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, one of the only ‘found footage’ films I have ever liked, stages STRANGE HARVEST as a true crime documentary so right from the start there is already an overfamiliarity with the format and with that comes predictability. Things start well with a polished intro that introduces us to our key interviewees and by also showing us in unflinching detail the murder scenes left in the serial killer’s wake.
Unfortunately, that is about all there is to STRANGE HARVEST, the more the interviewees talked the less interested I became in what they had to say. The dialogue becomes repetitive and unconvincing relying heavily on having people repeatedly tell us how scared they felt, how they had never seen anything like this before, and other variations on that theme. If you are going to have people tell you how scared they were then do please have something scary to back it up with otherwise it is just a word floating around without anything to anchor it.
I felt that parts of the plot bore similarities to director David Fincher’s classic movie SE7EN – premeditated murders, visual clues deliberately left at each murder sight, no fingerprints left at the scene of the crime, both detectives coming across the killer midway through the film in person, as do Freeman and Pitt with Spacey’s photographer and the killer detailing everything in a number of handwritten notebooks – all of which is no doubt unintentional but every similarity it yields only serves to remind the viewer how a serial killer flick should be done and STRANGE HARVEST falls wide of the mark.