Dark Harvest is an unfortunate case of missed potential. The new, David Slade-directed horror film is now available on VOD.
The best thing one can say about Dark Harvest is that it doesn’t waste any time letting you know exactly what it is. The film, based on a 2006 novel of the same name by Norman Partridge, opens with a bloody prologue that doesn’t so much explain itself as it sets you up for the odd tonal experience to come. Between its opening images of teenage boys being cut down by a walking scarecrow with a pumpkin head and the Southern-fried piece of voice-over that accompanies those images, Dark Harvest makes it clear that it’s neither remotely self-serious, nor afraid to spill a little blood. In its subsequent 90 minutes, the film follows through on both of those promises.
What it never manages to do, though, is find the right balance between its own, heightened satirical tone and the already loose sense of logic that its story demands. For a film that’s about little more than a group of teenagers who are forced to hunt a monster every year, Dark Harvest has a surprisingly hard time addressing the many plot holes and questions that its premise invites. That not only dulls the effectiveness of its numerous, genuinely impressive instances of violence and mayhem, but renders the film largely toothless.
Heavily indebted to horror stories like Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, Dark Harvest takes place in the 1960s in an unnamed small Midwestern town that forces its teenage boys to compete every year in an event called “The Run.” Let loose every Halloween night, The Run’s competitors are ordered to kill a murderous monster known as “Sawtooth Jack” and, consequently, guarantee another year’s worth of “prize crops” for their town.
