Blood Harvest

It’s not infuriating bad enough to be a half star movie, but man, does it come close for a lot of reasons. The movie tries real, real hard to set up a red herring for the murder mystery it wants to tell that is never convincing in the slightest. The acting aspires to be amateurish; every take feels like the first, and if the rumor of the entire movie being shot in a 24 hour span is true, then I imagine everything IS the first take. The direction has less flair than The Room. Of the six kills in the movie, four are done offscreen, which runs counter to the concept of this being a slasher movie. The music is what happens when you put baby’s first Casio play on demo mode. The middle portion drags at the speed of a tectonic plate. And it takes every chance it can get to get the lead actress naked, which, hey, I get that slashers usually have nudity, and I’m not complaining about boobs, but this movie is downright icky about it. And that brings up something very problematic. At about the 60 minute mark, there’s a pair of scenes with the male and female lead. They’re former lovers, but she now looks at him like a brother, and he’s still harboring feelings. She has a scare from the killer, he “comes to her rescue” after the fact, and takes her … into the bathtub … where she’s almost unconscious … and soaps down her body … and then takes her nude body to the couch … and fondles her and there is some VERY intimate contact between actors … and then undresses and lays down on top of her. It is a LOT. A creepy, skin-crawling lot. It is gross and prurient and and unnecessary. It isn’t violent, which is at least a small dribble of relief, but every moment of it feels like an eternity, and for a movie that feels twice its 85 minute runtime already, 5 minutes or so of slow-motion sexual assault on an unconscious woman is 20 minutes too much. And did I mention she immediately forgives him for this, and chalks it up as a misunderstanding? BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS. The only positives I can give this movie is it does gore well (when there is any), and Tiny Tim does an effective job as a creepy clown. But, uh, that’s it. It’s not terrible enough to be fun to riff on, the killer’s identity is obvious from the word go, and it squanders a cool premise and setting about failing farmers in rural America to tell a story that is 100% slasher tropes. No real reason to watch, unless you’re hard up for boobs. Hooptober 2022 movie #2/31