By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Casey Likes, E’myri Crutchfield and Luke Kirby
Directed by David Slade
Written by Michael Gilio
MGM
The opening nighttime scenes of DARK HARVEST contain tableaux of dark beauty that set the perfect mood for this Halloween-set tale. As visualized by director David Slade (30 DAYS OF NIGHT) and cinematographer Larry Smith, the town of Bradbury is an oasis of light in the midst of vast cornfields, only one road seeming to lead in or out. A church that will play a key part in the plot has its front steps festooned with jack o’lanterns. There’s an immediate and specific sense of place established that is maintained throughout DARK HARVEST; it’s just a shame that the story isn’t as satisfyingly sustained.
DARK HARVEST opens on Halloween night 1962, as Jim Shepard (Britain Dalton), one of a mob of masked teenaged boys running through Bradbury’s streets, kills a fearsome being known as Sawtooth Jack. For this act of heroism, his family is awarded $25,000 and he is given a brand new Corvette, which he wastes little time in driving out of town. We soon learn that this is a yearly ritual: Sawtooth Jack emerges every All Hallow’s, and the local young men are tasked with stopping him from reaching that church. If they fail, their crops and livelihood will gravely suffer. Once the movie jumps ahead a year to the week leading up to Halloween, it is explained that all those kids are locked in their rooms for three days without food or water before what is known as “The Run.” There is something of an explanation for this, but not a sufficient one to explain why Bradbury’s adults find it necessary to unleash a mob of hangry teens–who are indeed seen going off mission to terrorize a butcher-shop owner later the film.
There are a number of holes like this in the screenplay by Michael Gilio, based on Norman Partridge’s novel, and that’s a shame, because Gilio, Slade and their cast do a good job of setting up the situation and the key characters. Our protagonist is Richie (Casey Likes), Jim’s younger brother, who is exempt from “The Run” due to his sibling’s achievement and takes a lot of static from his classmates for it. Richie is anxious to take part and prove himself, to the dismay of his parents (Jeremy Davies and Elizabeth Reaser), who have enjoyed a move to a better part of town thanks to Jim’s triumph and don’t want Richie to upset the status quo. The class-conflict allegory running through DARK HARVEST, with an extra level added when Richie befriends African-American Kelly (E’myri Crutchfield), gives it a heft missing from many teen-oriented horror films.
At the same time, Slade doesn’t shy away from the graphic content, staging a number of startling kill scenes once Halloween night falls and Sawtooth Jack wakes up to begin his murder spree. Makeup effects designer Francois Dagenais (a veteran of the SAW sequels and TV’s HANNIBAL) and visual effects supervisor James McQuaide oversee a number of showy and startling moments of bodily and cranial destruction, and it’s to their credit that it’s hard to tell where the practical gags end and the CG trickery begins. Sawtooth Jack himself is brought to impressive physical life by Vincent Van Dyke Effects; somewhat resembling a cousin to Pumpkinhead but with an actual pumpkin head, he’s a scary creation with genuine presence.
It’s too bad, then, that the second half of DARK HARVEST gives us situation without sufficient explanation. The more we learn about how things work in Bradbury, the more questions arise about why, and trying to make sense of it distracts somewhat from the terrific atmosphere Slade and Smith conjure up. Where the acting is concerned, Likes and Crutchfield make empathetic impressions, while Luke Kirby as a police officer who enforces those dubious rules is mannered and over-the-top from his first scenes. (“This guy’s stuck in one gear,” Kelly says of him, and she’s not kidding.) I caught DARK HARVEST at one of its special advance Alamo Drafthouse showings, where that striking cinematography looked great on the big screen; yet once it hits digital platforms this Friday, it will probably play better overall at home, where its uneven qualities might be easier to overlook and it can play as a creepy-enough Halloweentime diversion.
