‘Strange Harvest’ Review: A Clever Mock Doc Convincingly Tracks a Fiendish (Fictional) Serial Killer
America’s obsession with serial killers has made posthumous industries of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy and others, while providing a foundation for the entire “true-crime” genre onscreen and in print. How much is too much, when it comes to this popular fixation? Well, one measure might be the existence of “Strange Harvest,” an elaborate faux documentary about a fictitious serial slayer. Subtitled “Occult Murder in the Inland Empire,” Stuart Ortiz’s feature maintains its ruse convincingly right up to the final credits, when those who stumble in blind might be surprised to find actors credited with playing all the supposed “real people.”
It’s worth asking why a stunt like this is even desirable. Wouldn’t a more conventionally staged horror movie provide better opportunity for suspense and thrills, being unconstrained by requirements of mimicking reportage? Probably yes. But beyond the admiration generated by its immaculate imitation of tabloid journalism, “Harvest” does manage to be creepy, if not exactly terrifying. It gets under a viewer’s skin with its sheer dedication to making a wholly imagined tale look like something ripped from the headlines.
Ortiz seems very invested in such sleight of hand. As The Vicious Brothers, he and Colin Minihan made 2011’s “Grave Encounters,” one of the better entries in the overtaxed found-footage subgenre. After collaborating further on its sequel, plus subsequent indie thrillers “Extraterrestrial” and “It Stains the Sand Red,” they went their separate ways. But Ortiz’s first feature as a solo writer and director can be seen as an extension of the found-footage template, one conversely demanding great attention to detail in a form that’s notably attracted a lot of lazy, imitative filmmaking since “The Blair Witch Project” dropped in 1999.
Opening text informs us “The following is considered one of the most unreported cases in Southern California history” — though had it actually happened, it would surely be one of most notorious in U.S. history. A welfare check by a worried friend led police in mid-2010 to a family’s home in a gated suburban community. There, they found (and we see in officers’ bodycam footage) the dead mother, father and daughter duct-taped to dining room chairs, their feet in the industrial-sized buckets they bled out into from arterial incisions. As if all this wasn’t grotesque enough, a mysterious symbol had been painted on the vaulted ceiling far above. That element caused Homicide Detective Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) to exhale, “Oh my god, he’s back.”
Evidently, 15 years earlier, there had been three individual murders in Riverside and San Bernadino counties. The victims and methods of death were so disparate, investigators initially drew no connection between them. But eventually they noticed shared “ritualistic aspects” and began receiving hand-penned notes from someone who knew crime specifics unreleased to the public. This person signed off as “Mr. Shiny,” writing, “Thanks for not catching me!” and ominously warning, “Ten transits remain. … I’ll be back.”
Yet that was the end of it, until the much-later family slaughter that appeared far more painstakingly planned and executed than those “sloppy” original killings. Soon there were more victims, collectively comprising no telltale “type” at all. But they were united by the meticulousness of their ugly demise (including single body parts removed) and cryptic references to what looked like occult beliefs. In the long layoff between sprees, however, something had changed: Advances in personal and public technology meant there was much more frequently a camera in the vicinity. So despite the masked killer’s skill at rarely leaving fingerprint or DNA traces, the authorities begin catching glimpses of him: On surveillance footage invading a donut shop at closing time to attack its lone employee, or making an unwelcome bedroom appearance as a teenage girl recorded an online makeup tutorial.
These events and more are primarily narrated by Kirby and fellow investigator Detective Lexi Taylor (Terri Apple), in ersatz studio sit-downs for the “documentary” crew. There’s also input from experts of various kinds, victims’ friends and relatives, accidental witnesses to some of “Mr. Shiny’s” activities and so forth. Eventually, the cops do get a lead on the maniac’s identity; we even hear from someone who knew him in younger days. But this intel only adds to the mystery — he (played by the film’s production designer, Jessee Clarkson) remains a cipher, his motivations never clarified.
Meanwhile, “Strange Harvest” cruises along like true-crime television fodder, complete with deftly faked news reports, man-on-the-street interviews, Zoom calls to relevant academics and explanatory motion graphics, along with stealthily slipped-in real stock images and footage. Sarah DeCourcy’s original score betrays no winking ironical distance from what she likely provided actual true-crime series “Women on Death Row” a couple years ago. All the narrative and stylistic tropes of such poker-faced, typically small-screen fodder are faithfully reproduced. It’s a clever assembly that seldom tips its hand, with onscreen participants doing a fair job of not appearing to be professional actors.
Some of the murder scenes (as discovered by police well after the deed’s done) have a whiff of “Se7en” in their unsettling surplus of malevolent invention. There is an action climax, as authorities finally close in on a fleeing yet stubbornly purposeful Mr. Shiny in a forested park at night. His enigmatic, blood-soaked mission — which doesn’t spare a few unlucky bystanders — duly raises some goosebumps. But it leaves a load of unanswered questions as well, with a post-final-credits clip teasing an explanation that itself is entirely vague.
