By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Andy Ortiz’s Strange Harvest is a film that from a technical standpoint is extremely well made, but frustratingly falls apart due to a combination of the limitations of its format and a tonally out of step narrative shift in the final act.
Told mainly in Netflix true crime documentary style archive interviews, Strange Harvest blends elements of found-footage, true crime, and horror together to tell its story. The film focuses on two detectives named Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Taylor (Terri Apple) as they recount the zodiac killer-like case of Mr Shiny, an indiscriminate ritualistic serial killer that various sections of law enforcement are unable to get any kind of a handle on. As Mr Shiny’s crimes become more and more bizarre, it becomes clear that there isn’t any length to which he will not go to satisfy his perverse appetites.
As a director Ortiz manages to ape the style of a Netflix true crime documentary with an almost alarming accuracy – to the extent that for about five minutes I thought I was watching an extended episode of Making A Murderer. Everything from the lighting, to the use of archival footage, and the revolving cast of interviewees creates a strong sense of detail that puts Strange Harvest apart from the usual found footage slop.
The acting is pretty solid across the board, both Zizzo and Apple come across as convincing in their respective roles, and the actor playing the killer, whose name I won’t reveal for spoiler purposes, revels in the part of playing an irredeemable villain.
While this movie is more interesting than the average found footage bear, it’s pretty sluggish in its pacing precisely because it’s a found footage based story. This plot and these characters would be far more interesting if they were explored in a more conventional three act structure, done in the style of something like Memories Of Murder or Zodiac.
Where this film in my opinion, falls apart, however, is in the final half an hour. Before this both Ortiz’s script and his direction had gone out of their way to create a grounded and realistic tone, but the introduction of various supernatural elements (that again I’m not going to go into specifics about because of spoilers), completely destroys everything Ortiz had set up tonally in one fell swoop.
Overall, Strange Harvest is a film which does deserve to be praised for its originality but sadly doesn’t quite come together as a cohesive whole. Subjectively, the last act is a moderate deal breaker and smacks of a writer who didn’t quite know how to end the story – to the detriment of the various other positive qualities of the piece.
Bloody Flicks 