The Following Film Review is Based on A True Story. Reader Discretion is Advised.
According to statistics (that I’ve just now fabricated to support my claim), the average horror fan consumes approx. 736 true crime documentaries each year. It’s an outrageous number, but one feels closer to reality than zero. The good, however, is that those countless hours of over-produced, mildly exploitative junk content have prepared you for a new mockumentary from the co-director of the Reality TV parody Grave Encounters.
Stuart Ortiz’s Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire is an incredibly spot-on spoof of the now classic Netflix True Crime documentary format. It’s got salacious crime scene footage, distressing interviews with the parents of victims, cops that have gotten to close to the case, cliffhangers designed for commercial breaks, and a mysteriously intriguing intro montage. It so closely resembles the medium it’s mimicking that if you didn’t know any better you could easily mistake it for the genuine article.
“A grizzly serial killer vs cop procedural and an incredibly spot-on spoof of True Crime documentaries“
Strange Harvest follows the bizarre murders of “Mr. Shiny”, a ritualistic serial killer responsible for a series of murders in the early 90s. Several years later, after the cases have gone cold, he suddenly reappears, back with a vengeance and killing his way toward the climax of some undecipherable evil agenda. The cops have no leads and no motive beyond ‘psycho be psycho killin’ but it’s clear that Mr Shiny (TK) isn’t going to stop until he sees his master plan to its bloody finish.
It’s a serial killer vs cop procedural that plays out in Dateline’s patented blow-by-blow breakdown of events, with interviews and insight from all the players involved. Although, unlike so many true crime stories that want to monopolize your time (Hello 8-part docu-series’ that could have just as easily been a 60-minute special!), this tasty bit of trashy storytelling is a breezy 93 minutes.
Everything you love and love to hate about true crime documentaries is ingeniously re-created in Strange Harvest. And because it also has the added benefit of being fiction it’s able to get weirder and wilder than a real-life documentary ever could. Personally, I don’t really want to see crime scene photos unless absolutely necessary, but purely fictional crime-scene walk-throughs of grizzly murders perpetrated by an occultist serial killer? Yes, please!
“…the most accomplished true-crime mockumentary since The Poughkeepsie Tapes“
For those who love the subgenre, Strange Harvest might be the most accomplished true-crime mockumentary since The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Not because it’s loaded top-to-bottom with NSFL sequences that will haunt you forever, but because it’s got one hell of a great cast that looks the part and talks the talk (including Peter Zizzo & Terri Apple as the detectives assigned to the case). Clichés and all.
It’s a cat-and-mouse game with tons of twists and turns and you can tell the team had a heck of a time playing with the format. In some sense it’s almost too faithful of an adaptation, bringing along with it some of the faults and failing of the true-crime template. Regardless, it delivers a Manhunter-esque story that weaves spiritual occultism with cagey criminal profiling, and one hell of an impressive send-up of the ultra-serious documentaries plaguing every streaming service right now.
