Strange Harvest has the rotten luck of being made in the wrong century. If this movie were made in 1995, it would have been a Blair Witch like sensation. Yet another thing the Internet has ruined. And yet, Stuart Ortiz’s film is so well constructed it sent me into a worried deep dive after the film, tricked into thinking this was a real story (thank GOODNESS, it’s not).
This mockumentary takes into the “true crime” world. Lead detectives Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Lexi Taylor (Terri Apple) take us into through their toughest case. It’s a decades long pursuit of the Mr. Shiny (Jessee J. Clarkson) murders, starting in the early 1990s and going through the mid 2010s: a killing spree that rocked California’s Inland Empire to its core.
The magic trick of Strange Harvest is its understanding of how to tell a true crime story. I don’t know how many Netflix documentaries Stuart Ortiz had to watch to get the patterns down, but all I can say is mission accomplished. The talking heads dialogue guides us through, even teasing us every 30 minutes – in case this ends up on a streamer probably. There’s grainy footage from all types of situations: body cams, video surveillance, laptop streaming, etc. There’s more than a couple simulations, charting the murder’s movements or planetary alignments. There’s even planned “emotional” moments to help make people like me question the reality of this movie, even though I KNEW this was a mockumentary. So Stuart Ortiz, if you run into hard times, just give Netflix Strange Harvest, and ask them to direct their next couple true crime docs: you proved you do it as good or better than anyone.
Being a fake doc can only take you so far. At some point, you’ve got to scare the audience for the horror movie to work. I was a little worried at first, as Strange Harvest takes a good 30 or so minutes to build its story, with only really teases at action that took place. In hindsight, that’s because we’re about with the cops, who are step behind the killer. All that ground work though builds wonderfully to a big moment where the movie grabs you. Using a basic innocent setup, Ortiz delivers one of those gasp then pin drop moments that the greats like Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity were so effective at, taking the movie to the next level. The last hour/45 minutes builds in a nice mixture of escalating tension with scary sequences, and should have you on the edge of your seat. It flirts close to being cruelly manipulative, but ends up on the right side, leaving enough on the table to sufficiently satisfy but still unsettle the audience at the same time.
I hope most of you find my review of Strange Harvest after seeing the movie. I was lucky enough to go in knowing very little…which worked wonders as the film slowly washed over me. Except for San Bernadino County, I hope you DO read about Strange Harvest beforehand, so the movie doesn’t make you instantly put your house on the market.