Copyright 1998-2004 Screaming Stoner Video || Last Update: 10/06/07 @ 4:20 PM

We're fans of bad movies, don't get us wrong. When it comes to our tastes, sometimes the worse the better - know what we mean? The thing is that it's pointless movies that bother us. "Pointless" might be a bit harsh, unstructured might be a more politically correct term. Unearthly Harvest by John Swanson is a whole new level of bad. Imagine taking all the b-movies from the last fifty years, chopping the film into random segments and throwing them together with a professional score. Unearthly Harvest is worse.

How so? Let us explain...

This film is meant to be a sort of homage to the awesome 70's films of American International Pictures (Abominable Dr. Phibes / Blacula) meaning that the overacting is intentional. The film begins with the traditional boyfriend and girlfriend alone in a car on a deserted country road. Suddenly a meteorite (or something) lights up the sky, the boyfriend goes to investigate and moments later the unfortunate thrill seeker ends up splattered on the windshield.

Why? Who knows. Who done it? You never find out.

Early on we thought this was going to be a take on The Blob, not!

Was this film meant to be set in the seventies? What's with the Letterman jacket? It certainly seemed so and at times the super-grainy Fujicolor print made it feel like we were watching a film from the decade, that is until the Kenwood pull-out CD players and Nirvana t-shirts starting showing up. Assuming that the big meteorite has some bearing on the story, the movie continues to tell the tale of a man known only as Professor Desmond Samuelson (played by Steven May) who for no reason shows up unannounced at two old ladies' home. He and his two traveling partners Steven and Sandra (who are also there for no apparent reason) manage to talk the two elderly ladies into allowing them all to stay in exchange for a $5,000 pay-off in back taxes.

Confused yet? Wait, it gets worse...

Somewhere along the way the odd Preacher Soggybottom gets brought in with his extra huge Bible and he starts trying to tie up the loose holes with a quote from the Good Book trying to state that the evil Professor Desmond is a Nephilim^(*) and possesses a copy of the Necronomicon (less than a century old) to use against them. Through all the line-gurgling and tremendously bad acting there's some type of a love story going on between the totally hittable Robert (Ryan Reuter) and the bad-wig-wearing Sandra (Nico Webster). Whatever.

By the time the amateurish video-game CGI graphics of little red demons, floating tea-cups and blue fishlike angels hit the screen in the latter part of the film's so-called conclusion, we were praying for the end. Thank God it came just like for the Nephilim!

The only descent acting in this entire film was that of the two old ladies, Emily and Martha Emerson (Mary Vallero and Lucy Marshall). The rest of the cast is pitiful. A word of advice - if you're going to make a movie that throws props to the seventies, than don't use CGI. Just a thought. Another word of advice to all aspiring filmmakers; before you set out to make a movie make sure there's no holes in the script, or at least use one. The music by Frank Macchia (Haunted Mansion) was noteworthy but the gore was overused for the type of film this aims to be. Our widescreen cut runs exactly 70 minutes.

According to the DVD packaging, there's a whole slew of extras ranging from deleted scenes to commentaries. Our review disc however only contained the movie and a trailer for Unearthly Harvest. There's no chapters and the disc will loop and continually play the trailer over and over unless you eject the disc - good going! Not.

*Nephilim: The director's use of the term is also in error. Nephilim were the offspring of Angelic rape as stated in Genesis 6:4 and the Hebrew word transliterated "Giant" means "tyrant." However, the director seems to have forgotten that the Nephilim were completely destroyed by God and were the sole cause of Noah's Flood (Genesis 6:13).

Smoker's Soapbox:

We wish we could find one redeeming quality about this motion picture but we can't. Certain moments are atmospheric due to heavy fog but that's about it. We can say that being fans of most of the American International Pictures catalogue that Unearthly Harvest isn't a tribute but rather an embarrassment. If a director doesn't care enough about his film to yell "cut" and re-shoot a scene when an actor chokes on his lines, why should we care about watching it?

Hands-down, the worst film we've seen this millennium.

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