Dark Harvest

Rent this only movie if you're in the mood for laughs (for sheer stupidity) , as this movie wouldn't scare a bunch of kindergartners at a Halloween party! The trouble is, there is too much gore for kiddies, so definitely don't put this in your VCR for the toddlers. It starts off with a little bit of promise, giving you the impression that the box cover artist may have actually started watching this film before designing the cover, but then descends quickly into epic stupidity. The "killer scarecrows" are clumsy oafs that are about as scary as the one in the Wizard of Oz, but not quite as smart. If they'd only had a brain...? I got this movie for $1.20 at a local discount/close-out store and even so, I feel somewhat ripped off. I think with all the other comments posted here, if you actually pay to see this, you can only blame yourself.

This movie is proof that Alliance Atlantis do not review every movie that they distribute. I want my $5 back. The acting was horrendous, the lines were clichéd, and the camera shots were just like someone's home made video. The movie started out interestingly enough with the murders. The first two minutes was the only good part. The remainder of the film was fragmented with a stupid storyline and annoyingly bad actors. The costumes looked like something out of Superstore. At least put some thought into the costumes, man! The cover art on the DVD looks so scary, like Jeepers Creepers. But it is deceiving! I've seen Bollywood movies with more style and substance than this sad attempt. I couldn't believe Alliance Atlantis distributed this movie.

Picked up this movie since it supposedly took place in my home state of West Virginia. I was pleasantly surprised when they show a map of the fictitious 'Carson County' and it's right beside my hometown! The background and the build-up was great, right up until the scarecrow popped up. It was all downhill from there. Very lame. You can hear crows in the background during the daytime, even they aren't scared. It was more humorous than scary. If you look at it as funny, then the movie is a winner.

Terrible acting...how would you react if you just received an inheritance from the biological father you never met? For the guy in this movie it was as though the milk he just poured on his cornflakes was white. Bad special effects, good setting, and a skinny-dipping scene. That about sums up the movie...the truly irritating part is the story appeared to have potential in the first few minutes.

One of the best parts of the film comes during the credits. The film crew cannot figure out how to get fire from one place to another. They have fire on the ground...and it stays where it is. A stage hand comes over with lighter fluid, and sprays a lot of it on the ground in the direction the flame is supposed to go...then he goes to get another bottle of lighter fluid, and the fire finally reaches its destination. With special effects geniuses like that, it is no wonder the movie was so awful.

I submit that inside the genre of independent film making, mediocre is worse than bad. Dark Harvest is so stereotypical that it should be shown to film students as a textbook example of how not to make an indie horror film.

The script, you would suppose, is the one area where an indie film can triumph over a Hollywood blockbuster. If you're writing it yourself, you can put in any combination of the bizarre, the shocking, the horrible, anything at all that you might think would keep an audience interested. That just wasn't done in Dark Harvest. There is nothing to keep you interested, just the standard slasher movie plot, not done very well, with unoriginal monsters and uninteresting characters.

I won't bother with the boring and predictable plot covered by other reviewers, nor the wooden acting, lousy monster costumes and moronic dialogue. If you've read the other reviews you already know that much, and it's not arguable - the movie is simply that bad.

It's not bad in that way which intrigues those who enjoy bad movies. In those cases, the movie is so bad that it's good - but Dark Harvest isn't. It can only aspire to such depths of bad film making. Instead, it is so middle-of-the-road, suburban white-bread generic that there is just nothing to capture your interest.

Is there any good in it? Well, there is a mid-morning skinny dipping scene that is entertaining for about a minute, if only because of the display of female posteriors. That's only one minute, though, and it's never repeated, so if you're in the market for a horror movie with skin - this isn't it.

Let's do a checklist of all the things that make a good, or at least interesting independent horror film.

Good script? No. Good acting? No. Bizarre, unpredictable? No. Shocking, graphic? No. Special effects? Not special. Gratuitous nudity? Not nearly enough. Original ideas? Nope. Humorous, campy? If you enjoy watching ice melt. Any reason at all to watch it? None I can think of.

It's pretty much a waste of film and time. Not good enough to watch, not bad enough to be used as a yardstick to measure other films by.