By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
Starring Peter Zizzo, Terri Apple and Andy Lauer
Written and directed by Stuart Ortiz
Saban Films
Anyone who’s been near a television during the last few decades will find STRANGE HARVEST: OCCULT MURDERS IN THE INLAND EMPIRE, a new true crime-style pseudo-doc by Grave Encounters director Stuart Ortiz, comfortingly familiar. Set in LA’s Inland Empire, this mashup of ’90s thrillers, True Detective, and Lovecraftian science fiction – partly inspired by the runaway success of Tiger King during the pandemic – perfectly replicates the pulpy rhythms of this ubiquitous genre.
But the real trick is how that familiarity is used as a sneaky entry point into elevating the material and drawing the audience into a compulsively watchable yarn that’s stronger than the sum of its parts. In interviews, Ortiz claims to want to capture the “inherent rhythm” and “essence of modern documentary” style. He certainly has, with a veritable grab bag of twists, turns, and radical shifts to keep things interesting. Like Lake Mungo, its closest analogue, STRANGE HARVEST is economical, light on its feet, and somehow, still feels original, even as it confidently flashes its references like a detective’s badge at an active crime scene.
Of course, the film follows the investigation of a serial killer. Although the perp, Mr. Shiny (as he’s called in a reference to the works of Cthulhu Mythos author Michael Shea), may seem like he has a familiar M.O., Ortiz’s liberal blending of different allusions and genres keeps things moving in dynamic, unexpected directions. The investigation begins with a series of cold case murders committed in the mid-1990s before jumping to the film’s “present” of 2011, when the killer resumes his crimes. Mr. Shiny is a pure amalgam, prone to Zodiac-style creepy note writing, “ritualistic” practices and a diverse array of elaborate kills that often evoke The Silence of the Lambs (the only reference that feels overused, from direct line paraphrases to a very familiar death to the use of “UR Self Storage”), Criminal Minds and even some seasons of American Horror Story among others.
As true crime aficionados can tell you, serial killers typically stick to patterns of behavior, favoring specific kinds of people, places or methods. Not so here, and while that may technically make STRANGE HARVEST less realistic than, say, The Blair Witch Project, the mise-en-scéne, editing and style of performance are so well-modulated within the tenets of the genre as to make this fictional case feel stranger than fiction.
Ortiz’s experience with found footage horror serves him well as he intercuts “interviews” with the lead investigators, detectives Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Lexi Taylor (Terri Apple) (both delightfully straight out of central casting), the bereaved and the cavalcade of “experts” so necessary to any true crime show with naturalistic bodycam and crime scene footage (some creatively gory enough that perhaps only Geraldo Rivera would show it on air), cheesy graphics, TV newscasts on the case and stock footage of the greater LA area.
As the years pass and the bodies pile up, potentially science fictional and occult angles present themselves, much to the chagrin of the hardboiled characters hard at work catching a killer. On this score, the lore Ortiz builds in his script is spare but tantalizing. What does Mr. Shiny’s strange trademark symbol mean, and what do leeches have to do with it? “Carl Sagan, eat your heart out.”
STRANGE HARVEST from Saban Films and RoadsideFlix opens in theaters on August 8.
