Strange Harvest Gardens Grisly Faux True-Crime Terror
In the quiet community of San Bernardino, CA, a family of three has been gruesomely murdered. Veteran detectives Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Alexis “Lexi” Taylor (Terri Apple) immediately realize this was the work of a notorious serial killer known only as “Mr. Shiny.” This sociopath hasn’t killed anyone — that law enforcement is aware of — in over 15 years, and the fact they’ve started up again isn’t by chance. There’s a reason and a method to their madness. Problem is, only they know what that is.
From one half of the directing duo known as The Vicious Brothers (the minds behind the 2011 underground found footage gem Grave Encounters), filmmaker Stuart Ortiz makes his feature-length solo debut with Strange Harvest. This is a faux true-crime thriller that owes as much to something like Tiger King as it does The X-Files (with a dash of YouTube and TikTok stirred in for good measure). It’s a grisly piece of work — drawing at least minor inspiration from the New French Extremity movement, of all places — but one that manages to display its cutthroat ambitions with surprising subtlety.
Events are viewed through the perspective of the talking-head interviews of Kirby and Taylor. The detectives tell Mr. Shiny’s story with all its perplexing mysteries as best they can given the limited knowledge that they possess. Granted, due to the television documentary format, it’s not as if this story can go fully apocalyptic, at least not as far as its final destination is concerned. It raises more questions than it has answers for, and don’t expect too much clarity by the time things reach their blood-soaked fade-to-black denouement.
There are still plenty of shocks, and most of them leave a lasting mark. Ortiz utilizes a variety of techniques throughout the production. These range from inventively manufactured crime scene and newsreel footage to surveillance and laptop camera outputs to Dateline-type reenactments, and almost all of it is effective. Additionally, many of Mr. Shiny’s murderers are abhorrently original, including the one involving that first family we discover dispatched at their dining room table and another involving a man found in an abandoned swimming pool covered in leeches. Then there is what happens to a teenage victim, home alone and recording an online makeup tutorial. Everything involving her makes me shudder for a second time as I think about it all again now. It’s unsettling stuff.
But best of all might be the mythology that surrounds Mr. Shiny. Taking inspiration from several real serial killers and their psychotically unhinged motivations, Ortiz pieces together a demonic puzzle that’s written in the heavens and dictated by the placement of the planets as they are seen from the surface of the Earth. It all gets purposefully convoluted. To the filmmaker’s credit, it also ends up being creepily fascinating, and that’s even with the resolution being pretty much exactly what I anticipated it would be.
It can all get a little dry at times, and most of the performances are incredibly measured and not exactly emotionally complex. But that’s par for the course for a feature made under these sorts of TV doc conditions, and Ortiz (acting as his own editor) and his entire technical team — most essentially cinematographer Seth Fuller — do exceptional work on what was obviously a limited budget. Overall, Strange Harvest got under my skin, and as that’s exactly what it was intended to do, I’d say that makes it worthy of a look.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
