Dark Harvest movie review & film summary (2023) – Roger Ebert

David Slade’s latest movie, “Darkish Harvest,” an adaptation of the novel by Norman Partridge, is the kind of Halloween movie typically sorely missed from October releases. It’s not essentially attempting to scare you or throw you neck-deep right into a pond of “elevated horror” motivated by deep traumas and existentially motivated villains. Although motion pictures of that sort actually have their deserved and cherished area this season, “Darkish Harvest,” with its huge cornfields, remoted group, and pumpkin-headed creature, merely goals to scratch the spooky, autumnal itch. 

The movie facilities on the agricultural city of Bastion, Illinois, within the Nineteen Sixties, the place Halloween night time just isn’t for trick-or-treating. As an alternative, it guarantees the annual return of Sawtooth Jack, a vicious entity whose presence provokes a violent faceoff towards the city’s teen boys tasked with taking him down. In the event that they fail, the harvest and the city are doomed. 

The boy who takes down Sawtooth Jack will get a shiny new automotive and permission to depart city (which is forbidden to the opposite residents). His household additionally receives a brand new home in a nicer a part of Bastion and membership within the city’s guild. Richie (Casey Likes) is the youthful brother of final 12 months’s winner, Jim (Britain Dalton), who sped off in his new Corvette and by no means returned. Determined to reunite, Richie plans to be this 12 months’s victor. But the darkness surrounding the city begins to untangle, and Richie involves battle Sawtooth Jack and the town of Bastion itself.

The format of “Darkish Harvest” just isn’t in contrast to a contemporary lovechild of “The Starvation Video games” and “Kids of the Corn.” The tone is analogous, grave in occurrences, but considerably appropriate for a youthful viewers with oversimplified emotional calling playing cards and teenagers on the fore. The place the movie steps up is in its carnage sweet, with out-of-the-blue kills and unabashed brutality afoot. A hierarchy is shortly and simply established, with jocks in letterman jackets, greasers with “Bandit” painted denim jackets, and prepsters with glasses and collared shirts. There’s not a lot nuance to the identities of Bastion, however it’s not missed, because the precedence is to ascertain the gamers earlier than the onslaught begins shortly. 

Slade’s filmmaking is kinetic in the course of the movie’s central occasion, “The Run,” the place the boys, masked up and armed, pursue Sawtooth Jack (and, inexplicably, one another). There’s a phantasmagoric high quality to those scenes, boys bounding down the road so frantically it’s arduous to discern them as people somewhat than a rabid hive. The design of Sawtooth Jack is deliciously spooky, as his rotted pumpkin head and sinewy zombified physique terrorize the corn fields and nation roads. These pulsing scenes are matched with eerie however efficient slow-moving sequences. But, the worldbuilding of “Darkish Harvest” is so completely uncared for that a lot of the expertise watching is kind of confounding as we watch occasions happen with little to no context.