A short but sweet one from me! ‘Savage Harvest’ is a 70(ish) minute long SOV supernatural horror film that basically feels like what would happen if you put ‘Evil Dead’ and ‘Scalps’ in a blender.

The plot? a group of teens (20 somethings) head into the woods for a weekend of fun at a cabin, at which point one of the gang explains that many years ago the land they stood on was host to a group of native americans who split off from their main group to hide from colonists, they went deep into the mountains, and after some time accidentally stumbled on black magic teachings, slowly the tribe learnt the ways of Black magic and it consumed them, turning them into demons who are survived by magic stones.

Anyway; as you can imagine the gang find the magic stones and what follows is the ‘Evil Dead’ style ‘base under seige’ narrative, as everyone in the woods turns into possessed demons with ‘scalping’ on their minds, while whats left of the gang desperately try to figure out a way to break the curse.

And honestly? theres not much more to it than that, the scripts rather unoriginal in it’s plot, but it handles what it does pretty well, at 70 minutes I really cant grumble about the pacing and the tones pretty consistent throughout as well. The characters get a bit of development, but dont get bogged down in complexities…realistically because most of them dont make it to the end credits. Its a solid enough script, it just doenst really do anything to really truely break the mold.

The direction and cine are VERY heavily influenced by music videos (no surprise as the director primarily worked in music videos around this time) because of this, a lot of the movie does look quite a bit more stylish and coherent than a majority of other SOV movies floating around at this time.

However; this is a double edged sword as while having a style is nice, at times this film MASSIVELY overdoes it on trying to styalize the thing, at the cost of coherency to the script. it tries to make the visuals SO out there, there there are scenes where I did wonder if there was a point to it, or if the director just wanted to flex for a bit.

Compositions solid for SOV, I’d put this in the upper half quality wise for the genre, and the edit is a bit heavy handed, but ultimately tight enough to keep the show running, while breathable enough to allow the scenes to not lose focus.

the performances are pretty poor, even for SOV standards, but there are some glimmers of good moments here where we get to see some okay performances and some quite lively animation. The gore shots in particular are handled extremely well (if nothing else, this film looks nice and has VERY over the top and entertaining kill sequences).

The soundtracks pretty solid too, I believe it was done by some bands the director was working with at the time, and its suitably rocky for the over the top-ness this film presents.

All in all; I cant say this is an essential watch, nor can I say its an essential SOV flick. But it does what it sets out to do, which is worthy of praise…admittedly it is a little short on originality and it really doesnt push the boundaries of what its trying to do, but I could see this pairing up well with one of J.R bookwalter or maybe a Ron Ford flick.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/savage-harvest-1994/