Dark Harvest

David Slade, the director of one of the best vampire movies 30 Days of Night, is back after a long hiatus and delivers a Halloween monster slasher that has its bright moments but the potential was higher. The story is about a legendary monster called Sawtooth Jack who crawls out of a cornfield on Halloween and terrorizes the townspeople. A hunt is organized to defeat him, with a promising reward. The premise isn't exactly the worst, but the script it's a bit of an uninspired mess, though anyone who doesn't expect a gripping story from a horror film can easily sit through this one. The child characters are mostly assholes, so there's little sympathy to be gained here either, but I liked the retro feel of the film, which could easily have fallen out of the 80s (if this film had been made forty years ago, it would have had a lot more red). The monster itself looks nice and is decently uncompromising to the characters. The gore is excellent, I was surprised by that (a jaw ripped open, half a head chopped off and a body split in half in the air by moonlight beautiful!). The film is very nutritious in this respect and if there had been some proper mass carnage and monster battle in the finale, I would have been willing to go for a higher rating, but that didn't happen. The atmosphere and tension are not dazzling by any means, but I wasn't bored. The gore and monster were good, for me a cool Halloween one-shot that is brutally underrated. 56% on IMDB matches the quality better. 5.5/10. (16.10.2023)

Wow, that was a piece of shit. Totally ridiculous. I was expecting some major conceptual twist, like it's all a simulation, because nobody could invent a world with such stupid rules, where such absurd things happen without logical motivations. And there’s none. Whether it works any better in the book I have no idea, but I'm convinced that this world is not the right stuff for the film medium and would have made directors other David Slade break a sweat. The film doesn't just have a problem with the rules of the fictional world, but also in the interactions of the characters – at times it feels like they've forgotten what happened in the previous scene. I guess there was a lot of editing, or the script was written by an asshole. (14.10.2023)