Review: Blood Harvest (1987)
Directed by: Bill Rebane
Starring: Tiny Tim, Itonia Salchek, Dean West
Written by: Ben Benson, Emil Joseph
Music by: George Daugherty
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Vinegar Syndrome)
IMDb
A slasher movie starring Tiny Tim — the ukelele-strumming, falsetto-voiced, vibrato-crazed, curly haired oddball crooner who shot to fame covering the 1929 song “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in the creepiest way possible (if you’ve seen Insidious, it’s the song playing when the ghost kid is doing that goddamn disturbing dance while he listens to a record play) — sounds like something gloriously pried from your nightmares and put on film. That slasher, Blood Harvest, is about a young woman who returns to her childhood home and discovers her parents missing and the house vandalized. Her pops, it turns out, is responsible for foreclosing on the farms of many of the residents of their rural town and they weren’t so happy about it. It isn’t long before her childhood friends start dying. The first time I watched this flick, when I realized Tiny Tim was more of a bizarre side character than the killer, my disappointment was palpable. But I watched it again, knowing this, and it was better. But it wasn’t until this time, viewing número tres, that I started to appreciate the nutty wavelength on which Bill Rebane’s film operates. Tiny Tim is completely doing his own thing here; his borderline insane but sympathetic clown Marvelous Mervo (who gets an appropriately unsettling theme song during the end credits, sung by Tim himself) just shows up in the middle of scenes on occasion, spouting fanciful dialog that’s vaguely threatening but could also be completely innocent. Sometimes he cries. Sometimes he prays. It never has anything to do with what the other characters are up to. Finally, in the climax, he decides to get directly involved in things. Though he’s mostly on a side quest of his own, Tiny Tim’s presence, and truly affecting performance, really elevates what would be a standard bad slasher. The kills are repetitive and there’s not much blood involved in this harvest, but Tim is doing a thing and it’s fascinating. Itonia Salchek, in her only film role, spends most of the movie either in underwear or naked, but this is not T&A to be enjoyed: Every moment she’s showing skin, she’s either ogled or molested while she’s half-asleep or drugged. She and Dean West share the trashiest, most uncomfortable sex scene I can recall. This flick is a psycho-sexual mess. Complementing the sleaze is a score that sounds straight out of an afterschool special or perhaps a soap opera. It’s often inappropriate, but it’s appropriately distressing. Peter Krause (from HBO’s Six Feet Under) appears briefly in his first film credit. Blood Harvest is not a funny movie in any interpretation, but there’s a whistling scene that rivals Blood Rage’s “That isn’t cranberry sauce” line for the most hilariously random moment in an ‘80s slasher. This flick is more of a curio than a classic by any measure, but its strange allure is potent.
Overall rating: 7 out of 10
