By Geno McGahee
“There’s a serial killer on the loose here, Sheriff Roberts!” – William (Curt Hanson)
Oh what a time I used to have going to the video store and looking through the horror releases. In the early 2000s, there was a lot of straight to video horror and I would go every Friday to pick up some of the new releases. Yes, my Friday nights were pathetic, but at least I went out. Going to the video store is still going out. It counts. The movies had this sort of feel and the minute I began watching the 2004 indie slasher “HARVEST OF FEAR,” I was brought back to my times of walking down the aisles at Hollywood Video and deciding just which horror film would get my four bucks. This would have easily been one of them.
The town of Devil’s Lake has a harvest festival every year but twenty years ago, a masked man went around and killed a bunch of people. Well, as they get prepared for another, a masked man has begun doing it again. They initially arrested a slow guy named “Wally”, but these new murders suggest that they got the wrong guy. William (Curt Hanson) has seen this before when he was on the force during the first murders and comes down to try to stop it once and for all, but Sheriff Roberts (Don Alder) doesn’t want his help.
Billy (Ryan Deal) comes down to intern at the morgue and work for Dr. Jim Carpenter (Thomas Nabhan). Carpenter looks evil from the moment he gets onto screen and does the quick head turn responses that most bad guys do. His assistant, Stacey (Carrie Finklea), clicks immediately with the new intern but her old flame, police officer Jake Barker (Justin Ament), is not happy about it. Jake tries to win her back with threats and intimidation but, amazingly, it does not work.
The body count continues to rise and the killer focuses on college kids. All we really know about the victims is that they are college kids. They are introduced for a second and then killed in the next. The killer wears a black hoodie and a Halloween mask. It is apparent that this movie borrows heavily from SCREAM. In the year 2004, the SCREAM influence was still strong and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ll take the SCREAM influence over the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY or SAW influence any day of the week, but as HARVEST OF FEAR goes on, the poor writing and story-telling begins to kill it.
The college kids throw a party. Some die and then we get to a showdown with the alleged killer and Billy, leading to the return of William and the end of the murder spree. They closed the case, but did they release poor Wally? He’s been in there 20 years and he’s slow on top of that. This is why I’m against the death penalty. For all I know, they put Wally in the chair. Maybe Wally could become like Horace Pinker in SHOCKER and we can do a crossover film?
HARVEST OF FEAR is a film that you will watch and forget soon thereafter, but it is not without its qualities. I did enjoy the overall atmosphere of the film and it brought me back to my video store days when the world seemed a little bit more right. The budget is low, the acting is bad, but there is some heart in this and that can be seen. Some T&A was added to spice things up and they made sure to get attractive chicks. So, there’s a point or two there.
The biggest problem with this film was the screenplay itself. It was built on a bad foundation. All the elements were here to make a good film, but the script lacked and just basically filled in the voids with T&A. The reactions of those that were being killed were so unnatural that it takes you right out of the film. In one scene the killer kills one guy and then goes after his girlfriend. She just sits there screaming until he walks over. He doesn’t try to jump out a window or fight. She just waits for him to casually walk over and kill her. They say that acting is about reacting…well, they didn’t react well at all.
I am going to reluctantly recommend HARVEST OF FEAR. It was right on the line, but I’m going to give it the nod because there is enough here for any horror fan to chew on, especially those that were walking into the video store in the early 2000s and rented a million films just like this one. I found it a trip down memory lane and then thought…damn, I wasted a lot of money at the video store.
Rating: 4.5/10
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