The small-town legend/curse of Sawtooth Jack sees the town's teenage boys pitted against the creature in a kill-or-be~killed annual Halloween ritual called The Run to protect the cornfield crops - so far, all very The Purge meets Children Of The Corn. Here, however, the film is set in the late 1950s, with accompanying gangs, racial tensions, religion and S.E. Hinton sunsets, and the unfurling of the mystery surrounding The Run and Sawtooth Jack unravels carefully with an almost Lynchian take on the underbelly of straining-to-be-perfect American society. It is boosted by a very strong and confident central performance by Casey Likes as troubled teen Richie, and the film is surprisingly thoughtful and well shot for its budget, using all the necessary elements of slasher and rites-of-passage movies but offering an interesting take on the central idea. All the ideas might not fully hang together, and the creature itself is a tad underwhelming visually at times but works well as a presence (although it has to be said that the kills are full-on and well-realised on-screen). Overall, Dark Harvest offers an unusual and quite interesting twist on what could have been a standard horror tale.
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