A Colheita

I woke up and it was a beautiful day; the sun was shining, the birds were singing and i fancied getting a movie, something new, a horror movie perhaps? Like many other reviewers i came across what can only be described as a piece of poopy in a gold wrapper. The front cover is great, and the comment on the back is mesmerising - 'it will scare the crop out of you'...oh how i chuckle looking back at such naivety and ignorance.

One of the many things scarier than this movie is the acting skills of these 'actors'. I think, no, i did actually cheer when they got slashed up by these 'scarecrows', who were wearing some classic fancy dress costumes. I used to drive quite quickly past cornfields as i found them to be pretty scary at night, but having seen this movie, i nearly wet myself (through laughing so much) just at the sight.

I have seen scarier omelette's quite honestly, not mine though, i'm a dab-hand at cooking omelette's, and if anyone associates this movie with my omelette's, let's just say that i would create a situation in which they would be forced to watch this movie 3 times in a row.

If anyone has any good corn movies they can recommend, feel free to inform me. It's a great comedy if nothing else, OK it is nothing else. Enjoy, but a little advice - before pressing the play button on your DVD player, throw it out of the window.

Rent this only movie if you're in the mood for laughs (for sheer stupidity) , as this movie wouldn't scare a bunch of kindergartners at a Halloween party! The trouble is, there is too much gore for kiddies, so definitely don't put this in your VCR for the toddlers. It starts off with a little bit of promise, giving you the impression that the box cover artist may have actually started watching this film before designing the cover, but then descends quickly into epic stupidity. The "killer scarecrows" are clumsy oafs that are about as scary as the one in the Wizard of Oz, but not quite as smart. If they'd only had a brain...? I got this movie for $1.20 at a local discount/close-out store and even so, I feel somewhat ripped off. I think with all the other comments posted here, if you actually pay to see this, you can only blame yourself.

A young man, who never knew his birth parents, receives an old farm in an isolated section of West Virginia upon the death of his natural father. He visits his property with a cross-section of potential victims including the comic relief black guy and a trendy lesbian couple. (Hmm, will there be skinny dipping? Take a guess.) Unfortunately, the party comes to an end when the spirits of drifters killed by his evil great-grandfather and used as scarecrows come back for revenge. This film starts out well. An artful montage of depression-era photographs and phony newspapers set against a speech by FDR - this, I believe, is his first appearance in a killer scarecrow movie- establishes the mood. I developed some hopes for the film, which were partially realized. The story was serviceable enough. The setting was sufficiently bucolic. The photography was mostly in focus. The acting, while no great shakes, was slightly above par for horror movies in this budget range. The film might've actually worked within the narrow demands of the genre if the scarecrows were scary. But they weren't They looked cheap. They weren't frightening at all. The better the monster, the better the movie. These scarecrows wouldn't scare Dorothy, let alone Toto.

Set in a nonexistent West Virginia county, this pseudo-shocker rings as appropriately hollow with nonexistent direction, acting, and cinematography.

Its requisite motley gang of protagonist post-teens includes an interracial couple and two lesbians (shock!)who indulge in gratuitous and graphic skinny-dipping (shock, shock!). A viewer could easily imagine pre-teen boys taking dad's digital camera and filming this silly, purulent piece to show in secret to their cronies. (And, of course, they wouldn't use the real name of their resident county, or grownups might find out just who the culprits were!) Worst of all, there's no scare in the scarecrows, the cornfields, the rural darkness, or anything else that better efforts have achieved.

I submit that inside the genre of independent film making, mediocre is worse than bad. Dark Harvest is so stereotypical that it should be shown to film students as a textbook example of how not to make an indie horror film.

The script, you would suppose, is the one area where an indie film can triumph over a Hollywood blockbuster. If you're writing it yourself, you can put in any combination of the bizarre, the shocking, the horrible, anything at all that you might think would keep an audience interested. That just wasn't done in Dark Harvest. There is nothing to keep you interested, just the standard slasher movie plot, not done very well, with unoriginal monsters and uninteresting characters.

I won't bother with the boring and predictable plot covered by other reviewers, nor the wooden acting, lousy monster costumes and moronic dialogue. If you've read the other reviews you already know that much, and it's not arguable - the movie is simply that bad.

It's not bad in that way which intrigues those who enjoy bad movies. In those cases, the movie is so bad that it's good - but Dark Harvest isn't. It can only aspire to such depths of bad film making. Instead, it is so middle-of-the-road, suburban white-bread generic that there is just nothing to capture your interest.

Is there any good in it? Well, there is a mid-morning skinny dipping scene that is entertaining for about a minute, if only because of the display of female posteriors. That's only one minute, though, and it's never repeated, so if you're in the market for a horror movie with skin - this isn't it.

Let's do a checklist of all the things that make a good, or at least interesting independent horror film.

Good script? No. Good acting? No. Bizarre, unpredictable? No. Shocking, graphic? No. Special effects? Not special. Gratuitous nudity? Not nearly enough. Original ideas? Nope. Humorous, campy? If you enjoy watching ice melt. Any reason at all to watch it? None I can think of.

It's pretty much a waste of film and time. Not good enough to watch, not bad enough to be used as a yardstick to measure other films by.