Dark Harvest

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.

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.

I picked up this flick because the cover interested me. Boy was I mistaken. For a low budget movie it started out OK. Your standard group of horror movie teens go to a isolated house and get hacked up. At some points I thought that this film would come up with something new. No chance of that. Not even the skinny dipping scene could save this flick.

I knew it was a bad omen when I saw that the writer was also the director, OK that's not the bad part. Some writers work good as directors of their own work(this isn't one of them). The bad part is that the costume designer and I think the director of photography both share the last name of the writer/director. Now I'm all for using family on a film if they can do the job but come on. First of all the scarecrows looked as if their masks were bought at the local costume shop and weren't even scary(more like laughable). Second the camera work was really bad. In the first scene in the present day, when the lawyer gets up the shake the kids hand the camera stays in place and shoots his torso for a moment. Come on.

On the plus side(not a lot of plus's). The gore FX were not bad. Their is a nice shot of a scythe coming threw a door and threw a guy's shoulder. Hey, if you want a laugh watch the end credits, they show all the bloopers(which is what the whole movie seemed to be to me). The "hero" with his tragic past tries to come across with some cool one liners but they just made me laugh.

Somewhere in this flick was a good story but I couldn't find it. In the end I felt that I wasted $2.00 and 90 minutes that I won't get back.

A young man, who never knew his birth parents, receives an old farm in an isolated section of West Virginia upon the death of his natural father. He visits his property with a cross-section of potential victims including the comic relief black guy and a trendy lesbian couple. (Hmm, will there be skinny dipping? Take a guess.) Unfortunately, the party comes to an end when the spirits of drifters killed by his evil great-grandfather and used as scarecrows come back for revenge. This film starts out well. An artful montage of depression-era photographs and phony newspapers set against a speech by FDR - this, I believe, is his first appearance in a killer scarecrow movie- establishes the mood. I developed some hopes for the film, which were partially realized. The story was serviceable enough. The setting was sufficiently bucolic. The photography was mostly in focus. The acting, while no great shakes, was slightly above par for horror movies in this budget range. The film might've actually worked within the narrow demands of the genre if the scarecrows were scary. But they weren't They looked cheap. They weren't frightening at all. The better the monster, the better the movie. These scarecrows wouldn't scare Dorothy, let alone Toto.

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.