Studio:   Saban Films
Director: Stuart Ortiz
Writer:   Stuart Ortiz
Producer: Stuart Ortiz, Bruce Guido, Alex Yesilcimen, Michael Karlin
Stars:    Peter Zizzo, Terri Apple, Andy Lauer, David Hemphill, Matthew Peschio, Dawsyn Eubanks, Roy Abramsohn, Matthew M. Garcia, Allen Marsh, Travis Wolfe Sr., Jessee Clarkson

Review Score:

Summary:

Police interviews and archival footage document the occult-related crimes of an elusive serial killer known as “Mr. Shiny.”

Synopsis:

Interviews with San Bernardino County homicide detectives Joseph Kirby and Alexis Taylor introduce the strange case of a serial killer known as “Mr. Shiny.” Their recounting of his gruesome crimes begins by discussing the 2010 deaths of Ted and Tiffany Sheridan and their young daughter Samantha, who were found exsanguinated in their home with their bound corpses arranged around a dining room table beneath a triangular occult symbol painted in blood on the ceiling. Det. Kirby immediately connected the symbol to a trio of ritualistic murders that took place between 1993 and 1995, but then went cold.

Jim Lizetti of US Forestry Services shows the location in the San Bernardino National Forest where the dismembered body of Shifa Gutierrez was found mutilated in 1993. Shifa’s friend Monica Konig alludes to Shifa having had a hidden life as a sex worker. Police traced Shifa’s last known location to Dean’s Corner motel where she was seen with a man who signed the name “Albert Shiny” in a guest ledger.

Shifa’s murder was thought to be an isolated incident until 82-year-old Ambrose Griffith was found gruesomely murdered in his assisted living facility nine months later in 1994. Police recovered a partial fingerprint from the crime scene, but they were unable to identify the suspect.

In 1995, 12-year-old Noah LaFone was abducted while walking home from school. When his body was found mutilated in the woods three months later, police also found the word “Kaliban” scrawled inside one of the boy’s school textbooks.

Two weeks after recovering Noah’s body, the police received a taunting letter signed with the triangular occult symbol and the name “Mr. Shiny.” Mr. Shiny described grisly details that definitively linked the three murders and also promised the “harvesting” of ten more victims still to come.

Despite his threat, there would be a 15-year-gap until Mr. Shiny resurfaced in 2010 by killing the Sheridan family. Three days after their bodies were discovered, the police received another taunting letter from Mr. Shiny, confirming his return.

Mr. Shiny goes on to infiltrate the home of Tamara Latorre and her boyfriend Glen Sandweiss. Mr. Shiny decapitates Tamara, and her severed head is later found by a jogger. Mr. Shiny also uses a blowtorch to horribly burn Glen’s face, but Glen survives and is able to tell police that Mr. Shiny referenced “Kaliban.”

A witness links Mr. Shiny to a white work truck with red lettering that police identify as registered to Victor Shamaz. Although Victor has a suspicious criminal record, the detectives ultimately confirm his car was forcibly stolen by an attacker disguised in a freaky mask with three holes.

Following another taunting letter, Mr. Shiny’s next victim was 43-year-old immigrant Dennis Zhao, whose body was found swarmed by unique leeches in an aquatic center pool surrounded by barbed wire and broken glass that prevented Dennis from escaping. Police determined Mr. Shiny was breeding these leeches, whose triangular bite resembled the occult symbol, to harvest Dennis’s blood over a painful three-day period. Mr. Shiny also cut out Dennis’s tongue to prevent him from screaming.

From the Craigslist personal ad through which he met Dennis, police trace Mr. Shiny’s IP address to a coffee shop. There, detectives meet Homer Johnson, a homeless man who met Mr. Shiny. Thinking he had been hired as a day laborer, Homer went with Mr. Shiny to his house. Mr. Shiny was intrigued by a diabetic medical bracelet Homer wore, but when Homer explained it didn’t belong to him and was recovered from a trash can, Mr. Shiny immediately grew angry and kicked him out of the car.

Homer directs detectives to Mr. Shiny’s house, which turns out to be a sparsely furnished home with the occult symbol over its front door. Among strange items discovered in the house, which was rented from a woman who only met Mr. Shiny twice, is a painting of a massive worm monster. A fingerprint found on a telescope is matched to the partial print recovered in 1994, and Mr. Shiny’s real identity is publicly confirmed as Leslie Sykes, whose next letter bizarrely praises occult gods while claiming there are still five more victims to go for his unknown plan.

Leslie Sykes’s next victim is 16-year-old Victoria MacEnroe, whom Sykes repeatedly shoots on camera while she records a makeup tutorial in her bedroom. Sykes then uses Victoria’s lipstick to draw the triangular symbol on her wall, after which something supernatural seemingly occurs, although it is not clearly seen due to the video glitching.

Incredibly, Victoria survives the attack and is taken to a hospital. However, through an elaborate scheme, Sykes successfully impersonates a nurse, avoids a security detail, and kills Victoria by poisoning her blood bag.

With public outrage increasing over the police’s inability to catch the killer, detectives begin looking more closely at Sykes’s past. Jared Kelly, a former friend of Sykes, details how Sykes’s behavior grew strange after he returned from a rock-climbing expedition in Joshua Tree. Sykes told Jared he had a religious experience where some kind of vision appeared to him in a cave, which Sykes cryptically linked to a “shambler from the stars” and something called “the thorn of time.”

Sykes next tries breaking into the home of Miles and Kelly Harris, but he is viciously mauled by their pit bull. Forced to change his plan, Sykes instead kills 31-year-old Leo Deetz and cuts out his heart as Leo works the night shift alone at a donut shop. Sykes then paints the symbol on a wall and escapes, although security guard Saroj Mallick identifies his getaway vehicle, which is later found abandoned. As a warning to others who may try aiding Sykes’s capture, Saroj is subsequently found murdered and displayed in a “blood eagle” pose on a playground.

Police research into Sykes’s background uncovers that, during his 15 years of inactivity, Sykes was travelling through the Middle East and Europe conducting obscure occult research. In Germany, Sykes attempted to buy a rare spellbook known as “The Scriptures of Valeel,” but when archivist/historian Jonas Eckhard refused to sell him the tome, Sykes stole it.

Remembering that Sykes’s fingerprint was recovered from a telescope, Detective Kirby decides to investigate what Sykes may have been looking at and discovers it was the constellation Ophiuchus. Joshua E. Terry, a professor of geobiology at Caltech, explains that Ophiuchus, which depicts a man battling a giant snake, is sometimes called the thirteenth zodiac sign. Professor Terry adds that the constellation is connected to a rare celestial event upcoming on May 13th, 2011, when Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn will be aligned.

Hidden behind a wall in the rented home, police find a key to a storage unit where they uncover Sykes’s “lair.” Inside the storage unit, detectives recover jars containing body parts cut from victims, detailed manifestos as well as files on the victims, an altar dedicated to a worm creature, occult books, and the words “Hail Azragor” written on a wall. Another letter from Sykes indicates he has one target left to kill.

At midnight on May 12th, 2011, Sykes breaks into the home of Glen and Stephanie Courtland and kidnaps their three-month-old baby Sawyer. On May 13th, the date of the planetary alignment, Jim Lizetti of US Forestry Services finds Sykes’s vehicle abandoned in the same spot in the San Bernardino National Forest where he previously found Shifa Gutierrez’s body in 1993.

Hours later, Silvia Vallejo calls 911 to frantically report that a masked man broke into her rental cabin and attacked her husband Martin. Police officers including Carter Pearce and Gilbert Richie arrive at the scene to find Martin lobotomized and Sykes having escaped with the baby.

Officers Pearce and Richie locate a makeshift altar and wooden pyre in a forest clearing. Sykes shoots and kills Richie before stabbing Pearce repeatedly, although Pearce ultimately survives.

Sykes prepares to burn the infant in the pyre just as a cosmic burst is seen in outer space. The unusual phenomenon causes a nearby camper, Elizabeth Perris, to suffer a seizure that gives her epilepsy while her friend Gayle acquires permanent vertigo.

Detectives Kirby and Taylor arrive in time to shoot Sykes, which prevents him from sacrificing the baby. Sykes suddenly disappears, but he is soon found dead in a nearby creek with leeches having eaten off his face.

With the case closed, police receive a posthumous letter from Sykes dated two days before his death. In it, Sykes claims the prognostication of Valeel has been passed to a willing pledge. He also promises “harvest season” will return, and so will he. Years later in 2023, Detective Kirby starts searching Joshua Tree for the mysterious cave that apparently drove Sykes mad.

Review:

Canadian filmmaker Stuart Ortiz is one half of the directing duo (the other half being Colin Minihan) that created “Grave Encounters” (review here), perhaps the pinnacle of fictionalized “haunted asylum” investigations in a “found footage” subgenre overstuffed with paler-by-comparison peers. In this same subsection of horror, “The Blair Witch Project” (review here) still wears the crown, at least popularly, for the “haunted woods” variant. Meanwhile, for my money, Drew and John Erick Dowdle’s “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” (review here) remains the most chilling use of the faux true-crime documentary format with an incredible atmosphere of a too-hot-for-TV “Dateline” episode that is just as disturbing now as it was in 2007.

Ortiz is evidently a big fan of “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” too, as his film “Strange Harvest” follows a similar construction that mirrors the other movie in a manner that’s remarkably able to maintain its own originality despite the déjà vu. In addition to emulating specific beats like a disfigured survivor and harrowing home invasion, however, Ortiz also carries over some of the shortfalls from “The Poughkeepsie Tapes,” specifically inconsistent acting that isn’t always entirely convincing, and its higher ratio of police procedural suspense to serial killer thrills has a harder time reaching the same level of thoroughly unnerving terror.

“Strange Harvest” chronicles the bizarre case of “Mr. Shiny,” an elusive murderer who baffled the police of San Bernardino, California, with a trio of ritualistic homicides between 1993 and 1995. Curiously, Mr. Shiny wasn’t seen again for 15 years. When he resurfaced in 2010, his crimes were more brutal than before, beginning a new spree of gruesome mutilations and exsanguinations linked by a triangular occult symbol often painted with the victim’s blood.

A definitive edge “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” holds over “Strange Harvest” is that a significant portion of that movie consisted of the killer’s unsettling home movies. Watching firsthand footage of him hiding in a bedroom closet, kidnapping a little girl in broad daylight, and creeping around his basement dungeon in a bird-beak mask felt filthy, like witnessing awful acts from a voyeur’s perspective under the pretense of entertainment whose eeriness transformed into something more sinister. Quite quickly, “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” went from being a passive home-viewing experience to making a viewer feel like an active observer immersed in multiple crime scenes.

“Strange Harvest” has far fewer scenes of Mr. Shiny caught on camera, which is one reason why it can’t completely echo the skin-crawling style of “The Poughkeepsie Tapes.” Instead, police usually arrive after the fact, although this affords ample opportunities for the film to showcase horrific tableaus highlighted by terrific makeup effects and creatively designed deaths. The flinch-worthy sight of a bound-and-gagged family of blood-drained corpses arranged around their dinner table, or a leech-covered body floating in a dirty pool surrounded by barbed wire and broken glass, can still be frightening simply with suggestiveness, without having to show how it happened.

Having a cast of mostly unfamiliar faces comes with pros as well as cons. The biggest pro is that everyone can reasonably pass as a detective or academic expert because an audience isn’t distracted with trying to remember what else they’ve been in, or worse, unable to see them as anyone other than a known actor. Roy Abramsohn of “Escape from Tomorrow” (review here) was the only person I recognized. The con that comes with using less-experienced performers is that their talking head segments sometimes sound rehearsed rather than organically off-the-cuff.

Otherwise, “Strange Harvest” excels at making every detail as believable as can be, and there are plenty of details packed into the project. Maybe some of the photographs were pulled from personal collections, but pixelating one face in a group or blurring the text on a body cam gives the impression that an imaginary legal team reviewed the film and insisted on alterations. The effort employed to shoot in various locations, some for only a few seconds of footage, and compile news clips with dozens of different anchors and station logos goes a long way toward making the movie appear authentic.

Some viewers may feel that illusion broken by the intrusion of a supernatural element midway through the runtime. “Strange Harvest” hints at otherworldly occultism long before that, but the midpoint includes a shot of an obscured action that makes the paranormal aspect prominent, even though the movie still has a full tank of cerebral dread it could continue running on at this point.

On the flipside, as a longtime fan of Lovecraftian fiction, I appreciate that Stuart Ortiz doesn’t recycle common references to Innsmouth, the Necronomicon, or anything else that might tie the movie too closely with well-known works of unearthly fantasy, to give Mr. Shiny his Elder Gods edge. Rather, Ortiz plants several seeds from Robert Bloch’s “The Mysteries of the Worm,” the famed “Psycho” author’s underrepresented contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos, to make unique lore mixed with mumbo jumbo that seems plausibly connected to reality, yet is still cryptic enough that Mr. Shiny’s motives remain creepy without revealing too much.

“Strange Harvest” probably won’t compete with “Lake Mungo” or “The Tunnel” for the title of most macabre mockumentary. But fans of those films should still find themselves captivated for 90 minutes as the intriguing breadcrumb trail left by Mr. Shiny comes together like any compelling true-crime story built from old broadcasts, new interviews, and slow zooms into family photos. Its grisliness is as gripping as any other film based on forensic frights, maybe more so for anyone else who has an affinity for the unspeakable scares of centuries-old creatures and celestial apocrypha.

NOTE: There is a post-credits scene.

Review Score: 70