Dark Harvest, 2023.
Directed by David Slade.
Starring Casey Likes, Emyri Crutchfield, Jeremy Davies, Luke Kirby, Ezra Buzzington, Elizabeth Reaser, Austin Autrey, Megan Best, Britain Dalton, Jake Brennan, West Mulholland, Carter Heintz, and Logan Tomanek.
SYNOPSIS:
In a small Midwestern town, a deadly annual ritual unfolds when the mythical nightmare, Sawtooth Jack, rises from the cornfields and challenges the town’s teenage boys in a bloody battle of survival.
Dark Harvest has a lot going for it; a long overdue scary-season release, a critically acclaimed source-novel, and Hard Candy director David Slade at the helm. The perfect set of ingredients for a cult-classic in the making.
However, dip your hand into this Jack-o’-lantern and you’ll find very little in the way of treats or frights. In their place is a slice of haphazard American gothic that could so easily have been the next Jeepers Creepers, but instead feels like a weaker segment of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, or other such anthologies.
The first issue is that Norman Partridge’s slight novel isn’t heavy on characterisation, with the book unravelling in a second-person narrative style that contains multiple threads that jump around to the various people scattered across this backwater town. While that adds to the immediacy and chaos of this Pumpkin-headed Purge night, it means that there’s very little to care about beyond the intrigue of the spectre at the heart of this Frankenstein tale; Sawtooth Jack.
The movie attempts to compensate for this by pulling together some of those liquorice-lace plot threads into a more linear story, but forgets to do anything about giving the characters depth.
There’s a lot to like about the Stephen King-style small-town community, which invokes both iterations of It, but the people who occupy it feel like Rydell High extras, turning up collars and hamming up their lines.
As for Sawtooth Jack, he’s a fascinating boogeyman, and the undoubted hook of both the book and movie. Relentlessly and unquestionably participating in this ritual of forced masculinity and legacy hatred, themes which echo through to modern backwater America and beyond. He moans and groans his way through taunts and laughter from his pursuers with an aura of sadness, which often hangs over some of the best screen monsters. He also gets to dole out some delicious retributory gore, befitting of a director who delivered similar ick in the brilliant 30 days of Night. It’s just a shame then that because of the choppy nature of Dark Harvest, we feel as little for his plight as we do the characters we’re meant to be rooting for to survive the night.
On which, without prior knowledge of the book, the Hunger Games-style ceremonial events can come across as confusing. More explanation as to why the boys have to starve themselves before the hunt might have given some clarity to actions that occur later in the film. Originally set for release in 2020, it’s things like this which make you wonder how much chopping-and-changing was done before it was dumped on streaming.
The performances are largely fine, even if a lot of the peripheral characters sometimes feel as though they’re doing a kids-as-grownups, Bugsy Malone routine. And as if wasting Sawtooth Jack was bad enough, the film also completely misjudges one of the book’s most loathsome characters with the lawman Jerry Ricks, who manifests here as a one-note, over-the-top villain that’s excruciating to put up with.
Despite some fleeting moments of pulpy-horror, Dark Harvest feels like a missed opportunity to create something that could have been cherished for Octobers to come. Kids of all ages whispering “Sawtooth Jack is coming to get you”, rather than “Can we put something else on instead?”
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
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