Strange Harvest (2025) review

Publication Date: 08-10-2025

Dir. Stuart Ortiz

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

Capitalizing on the masses’ insatiable appetite for true crime podcasts, deep-dives, and dissections, Stuart Ortiz’s Strange Harvest ends up being a believable recreation of the documentary genre while also serving up an engrossing serial killer story.

As “The Vicious Brothers,” Ortiz and Colin Minihan made Grave Encounters all the way back in 2011. That film enjoyed a solid shelf-life thanks to the emergence of Netflix streaming, and also solidified both men as capable of infusing the then-overdone found footage genre with some credibility. Strange Harvest is Ortiz’s solo debut as writer/director, and he’s clearly someone who has spent a great deal of time watching true crime docs on services like Netflix and Investigation Discovery. Here’s a faux-doc that nails all the beats and hallmarks of those projects that can’t help but rivet us.

Opening titles inform us that “the following is considered one of the most unreported cases in Southern California history,” possibly the film’s most unrealistic note, for if this were a true story, it would be in the pantheon of Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy in terms of memorability. In 2010, a welfare check ordered by a concern friend leads to police discovering the grizzly murders of a mother, father, and their daughter. They are found seated at their dining room table, their hands zip-tied and their feet in large buckets, containing blood from lacerations to their arteries. A large amount of their blood was then used to paint a symbol on the ceiling that strikes fear in Homicide Detective Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo). He’s seen that symbol before.

Kirby and his partner, Detective Lexi Taylor (Terri Apple), are the prime talking heads over the course of Strange Harvest. In 1995, 15 years prior to the murder of this suburban family, three individual murders occurred in California’s Riverside and San Bernadino counties. The victims were not connected and their murders were so wildly different from one another that investigators initially didn’t connect them. Then the police department started receiving cryptic letters from someone who called themselves “Mr. Shiny.” His first letter ends with, “Ten transits remain… I’ll be back.”

Mr. Shiny disappeared, until 2010, this time his initially “sloppy” killings turned into methodically planned, gruesome acts of evil. While he doesn’t have a “type,” his murders have ritualistic qualities, and victims often lose one of their body parts in addition to their lives. Mr. Shiny is careful enough not to leave fingerprints, but he can’t avoid the plethora of cameras around San Bernadino County, which helps Kirby and Taylor get glimpses of their man. It leads them to places like a bustling coffee shop in a strip mall, or the bedroom of a teenage girl who records her makeup tutorial.

Strange Harvest feels authentic in its presentation, which is complete with faux news reports, man-on-the-street interviews, video-chats with experts and academics, and a smorgasbord of stock/archival footage. I was particularly drawn to Zizzo’s performance. He nails the gravitas of a homicide investigator, illustrating someone who is deeply passionate about his work without leaning into the typical grizzled stereotype. Taylor is more laidback and blunt, unafraid to curse yet tactful in her explanations. The two are isolated in their interviews, but still achieve the effect that they work as partners.

The film’s production designer, Jessee Clarkson, plays Mr. Shiny, and is also damn effective, even when his eerie, angular face is obscured by a mask that looks like a swollen kidney. Even after his identity is revealed, he remains a frightening figure for a number of reasons. His motivations aren’t clear. His intelligence and interests run deeper than an ancient well. Furthermore, the way in which he kills his victims is diabolical enough to make John Kramer smirk. One involves an abandoned community pool and a copious amount of leeches. Another involves a swing-set, a displayed corpse ripped straight from Viking mythology, that will stay with me for a minute. Given Ortiz’s method of filmmaking, we don’t see these murders occur; we just see the gruesome crime scene footage and photos. For some of these killings, I’m grateful to have seen those and nothing more.

This is a story that would make for a gripping novel, or even an interactive website the likes of which Longlegs received. Strange Harvest is the best horror mockumentary I’ve seen since The Poughkeepsie Tapes, but thankfully it wasn’t subjected to the bullshit bait-and-switch release that film had to endure.

NOTE: I had the pleasure of chatting with Peter Zizzo, the lead actor in Strange Harvest, about his role as Detective Joe Kirby as well as his extensive work in the music industry, where he discovered artists like Avril Lavigne and Vanessa Carlton. Take a listen below!