Thread by @TetsuoKaneda

20 minutes into Dark Harvest and it's pretty much nothing but exposition. Did we suffer some collective amnesia in the roughly 40 years since the golden era of '80s nighttime chase thrillers and horror movies that meant we forgot how to make the kind of movie this should be?

We have had:

- A voiceover
- A prologue sequence
- An "as you know" intro sequence expositing our main characters
- A dinner scene to introduce the interfamily conflict in the protagonist's household

How the fuck did an explicitly descriptive medium nail setup better than this?

I don't remember this taking this long in the book of Dark Harvest. Maybe it did, but it set up all the dominoes REAL quick and spent most of the book knocking that shit over.

What's baffling to me, even treating the movie as its own animal, is how much of the premise they feel like they need to introduce us to.

Visually it's a very adept and competent film. It's well acted. But Dark Harvest's script is a fucking mess. I can't imagine who would read that book, extrude this script, and think the stories had more than the most superficial connection to each other.

I just hope Norman Partridge is getting a dump truck full of cash parked in his driveway.

26 minutes in, we're still going with the "I miss my brother" story we don't need? Anyone? Okay, guess this is what we're going with.

Okay, now we're getting to the movie. 27 fucking minutes, and we're to the point where the story actually starts. Almost half an hour. Half a goddamn hour of story and we get to an excellent montage and I'm psyched for what follows.

Annnnd back to exposition. There's something interesting in Richie that where everyone else seems doomed by tradition, he seems like fate's actively reaching down and grabbing his shoulder. I doubt they'll go anywhere interesting with it, but hey.

Much like the heroes' truck, this movie keeps stalling in the middle of the street when it should be running

Okay, back on track, my issue with Dark Harvest is that it's so well done that every single stupid choice feels intentional, and it makes me wonder why they keep making so many stupid choices.

This cornfield sequence is amazing, by the way. No notes, the October Boy versus a bunch of greasers in a cornfield is fucking great and the effects and atmosphere are top-notch right up until you see a close-up of Sawtooth's face.

Okay, why is it they gave Richie's friend Buddy, the one who's a side character who spends the beginning of act 2 bolting out of the cornfield massacre sobbing, the best emotional arc and stakes in this story?

Fuck Richie, give me the story of the kid who has to face racism from other high schoolers, saw Sawtooth kill a kid on his front lawn when he was eight, and is forced out of his house and back into the Run by parents who see it as their one shot out and want him to "be a man."

Alejandro Akara is acting his fucking ass off in this AND HE DOESN'T EVEN NEED TO

Why am I watching some white guy sad about his brother yell "fuck the rules" when literally everyone around him is telling a more interesting story?

And no shade meant to Casey Likes. He's doing a great job with the few ingredients the script gives him. But there are characters who didn't make it out of the second act alive who were more compelling than the script made Richie.

This feels like when it was written, it was a script in search of a story.

I dunno. Maybe I'm trying to order a milkshake at Home Depot.

But by the same turn, if Home Depot's gonna advertise they now do milkshakes, I'm going to expect a milkshake when I order one, not a glass of milk.

The supporting cast is amazing. The effects are amazing. The production staff deserves their fucking flowers. The lead's fighting the script, and the script, the backbone of the movie, is a wet noodle.

Does every supporting character in this movie get a dramatic trauma monologue? I get the lead actress getting one, E'myri Crutchfield nails it, but there's just so much going on here that doesn't really need to be? This feels like it went through multiple drafts

An hour and ten and we're finally to the big climax at the church, but there's not any real punch to it for me? There's been no clock, no extant threat, no real tension to the chase. There's Big Emotion to the scene, but I ain't feelin' it.

This is a nitpick, but there's no sense of movement to this movie. Look at The Purge: Anarchy, the kind of movie this wants to be— You have a series of locations, but there's a sense of transition and movement. It's not just random locations throughout the town.

It feels like people are popping up and disappearing at random, and it makes people coming out of nowhere at the end for the big finale lose its punch.

and now i'm pissed

I won't spoil what happens, but the fact that they decided to go with the symbolism from Partridge's novel but with an entirely different context just to differentiate themselves seems really unfair and cheap, especially considering the direction they're going in

Why use all the Christ symbolism if you're going to end the movie *like that*

...so they ended it as a prequel to the book? Is that what's going on here? Because there's no other way the last twenty minutes I just watched make any sense otherwise.

I am really just annoyed with that movie. All that care, all that work, all those resources, and they made *this*

Kinda happy I didn't see that in theatres.

So uh final score ***/***** an attempt was made

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