Dark Harvest screens at Alamo Drafthouse locations on October 11 and is available on digital October 13.
Teenage life can be a drag no matter where you're born. But prepare a special concerto for the beleaguered adolescents of Dark Harvest. In a sleepy, unnamed Midwestern hamlet of the early 1960s, the boys have more to worry about than just hormones and schoolwork. There's also the annual ritual thinning their ranks: To ensure a good harvest, they spend every Halloween hunting down a mythical creature, a staggering, shrieking scarecrow with a grinning Jack-o'-lantern face who rises from a cornfield and makes his way for the local church. If the beast gets inside, that year's crops are doomed. On the plus side, the teen who stops him gets to leave this rural hellhole – a privilege not afforded to anyone else – while his family gets a new house, a new car, and bragging rights.
Sawtooth Jack, as the monster is named (presumably because Pumpkinhead was already taken), does not go down gently. Watching him treat one kid's head like a Pez dispenser might be enough to have any of his classmates envying the potentially stoned-to-death residents of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," still the gold standard of stories about American small towns with death-cult practices. Over only a few pages, Jackson smartly teased out what awaited the unlucky "winner" of her contest. Dark Harvest reveals the nature of the annual activity up front, which is where the problems begin with this terminally silly creature feature, finally seeing the light of day after a series of delays.
Adapting an award-winning 2006 horror novel by Norman Partridge, screenwriter Michael Gilio at least attempts to meditate on what life would be like with a potentially fatal monster hunt hanging over your head all year. (There's a good early scene of the scared-shitless boys sitting around on bleachers, trying to convince themselves that Sawtooth isn't real – though given the body count he racks up over the movie, you'd think the shrinking size of their graduating class would put such coping speculation to rest.) But Dark Harvest's 1960s small-town setting never comes close to resembling a real place, and it's not stylized enough to pass for a David Lynch mirage of yesterday either.
The characters are no more credibly shaded. We follow Richie (Casey Likes), whose all-American football-hero brother caught Sawtooth the previous Halloween and promptly hit the road. Though he's exempt from the ritual, Richie wants a way out, too, and can you blame him? He prepares for the hunt against the wishes of his parents, played by a Stepford-chipper Elizabeth Reaser and Jeremy Davies with the same haircut, glasses, and sad-dad disposition rocked by Henry Thomas in another recent, similarly regrettable horror movie set in a similarly unconvincing 1960s America, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines.
Preparing for amateur Van Helsing duty isn't so pressing that Richie can't spark up a connection with the new girl in town, Kelly (E'myri Crutchfield), who endures some casual racism as the only Black person in the community. For someone not born into this insanity, Kelly seems awfully accepting of a place that sends its young men into yearly Hunger Games battle against a bloodthirsty demon. It's also not exactly believable that a town this insular – a town that literally prevents its citizens from leaving – would welcome anyone new. Enforcing the border is a single vigilant sheriff (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel's Luke Kirby, loudly delivering what might best be described as a Tim Robinson performance).
Inconvenient questions of logic and lore plague Dark Harvest like ravens settling on a scarecrow. Why does it have to be teenage boys hunting down Sawtooth? And how many teenagers are in this town exactly? Given the volume of blood the monster spills each year, it doesn't seem like the most sustainable ritual; at the rate Sawtooth butchers, you'd run out of bodies to feed into the pumpkin maw pretty quickly. Even factoring out his kill count, the kids themselves raise some significant havoc, running through the streets in Halloween masks like proto-Purgers, murdering each other and shopkeepers. Is the annual loss of lives and property damage really worth a bounty of vegetables? Also, how has this town with a secret managed to keep its secret? It's not some truly isolated religious backwater: They have cars and telephones!
Set aside everything nitpickable about Dark Harvest and you're still left with a ludicrous melodrama that works its way slowly to a predictable twist. Only gore hounds will find much to savor. David Slade, who directed the nifty 30 Days of Night, the queasy Hard Candy, and several episodes of TV's Hannibal, has some fun during the slasher portion of the evening. Anytime Sawtooth is beheading or gutting some poor high-school jock, the movie briefly lurches to life; there's a darkly hilarious moment where the big guy staggers into a bunker full of hiding teens, his unseen massacre causing a Shining-style tsunami of blood. He's a pretty good movie monster. He deserved a better movie.
