STRANGE HARVEST (2025)
Genre: Horror
Director: Stuart Ortiz
Writer: Stuart Ortiz
Starring: Peter Zizzo, Terri Apple, Andy Lauer
Platform: Streaming/VOD
Rating: 1.5/5
By Stephen Lackey
“STRANGE HARVEST perfectly imitates true crime…to the point it forgets to be a movie.”
STRANGE HARVEST is a true crime mockumentary that nails the look of the genre so precisely you might think you accidentally switched over to the ID Channel halfway through your popcorn. Unfortunately, it also inherits every single flaw that makes binge-watching real true crime docs feel like eating plain oatmeal for hours. There’s no suspense, no scares, and no drama. It’s just a movie that methodically reenacts the formula without ever finding a reason to exist as anything more than a very long episode of something you’d half-watch, while folding laundry.
From start to finish, STRANGE HARVEST is told entirely through talking heads. Every major event is described instead of shown, and every emotional beat is explained instead of experienced. The cast does a solid job at looking and sounding like real people being interviewed about something awful, but that’s all they get to do. There’s no growth, no tension, and no sense that anyone on screen has ever met a narrative arc in their lives. When we finally get the “big reveal” about the killer’s motives, it barely registers. The movie treats it like a footnote, and honestly, so did I.
The biggest problem is that STRANGE HARVEST doesn’t seem to understand what purpose it serves as a movie. True crime documentaries, at their best, thrive on atmosphere, dread, and the uneasy sense that the world is full of monsters in sensible shoes. But this? This is just a re-creation of the format, stripped of the real-world gravity that makes the genre compelling in the first place. It’s like someone watched Making a Murderer and thought, “What if this, but fictional—and without the tension?”
Even technically, STRANGE HARVEST can’t stay true to its own setup. It wants to live in the world of found footage, but then you start noticing camera angles that shouldn’t exist—shots from across the room when no one could be filming, editing that feels too polished for a “raw” documentary. Each time that happens, the illusion collapses, and you’re suddenly aware you’re watching a movie pretending to be something else. It’s a bit like catching a magician palming the card and then watching him finish the trick anyway.
The cinematography is…fine. Purposefully unremarkable. It looks exactly like the kind of over lit talking-head footage you’d find in a late-night Netflix queue. Which I suppose is a success if that was the goal, though it doesn’t exactly make for thrilling viewing on a big screen.
In the end, STRANGE HARVEST isn’t suspenseful enough for horror fans, not self-aware enough for satire, and not gripping enough to be taken seriously as drama. It’s just a movie that exists because it can. The actors are believable, the style is authentic, and yet none of it adds up to an experience worth having.
By the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t wondering who the killer was. I was wondering who greenlit this and thought, “Yeah, people need to see this in theaters.”
Verdict: STRANGE HARVEST perfectly imitates true crime…to the point it forgets to be a movie.
