A string of serial murders in California’s Inland Empire gets the true-crime-doc treatment in Strange Harvest, the new, entirely fictional “film” from writer-director Stuart Ortiz. What begins as a bleak police procedural quickly dissolves into a queasy mash-up of torture porn, occult cosplay, and half-baked found footage.

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The story kicks off with killings at a retirement home, followed by the murder of a 12-year-old boy. Police detectives Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Alexis “Lexi” Taylor (Terri Apple) guide us through the carnage via talking-head interviews, while graphics and crime-scene snapshots bombard the screen. Bodies are sliced apart, mutilated, decayed. Buckets of blood make cameo appearances. It’s not for the faint of heart – or for anyone who actually likes to sleep at night.

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The killer vanishes for years, then resurfaces with an increasingly grotesque flair. Each murder grows more elaborate, more sadistic, more baroque, until the film starts to feel like Saw: The Musical. The cops, deadpan as a late-night sketch, mutter quips about how apocalyptically fucked up it all is. The audience, meanwhile, is left wondering: to what end? Who is this movie actually for? What is it trying to say, besides “look how far we can push you before you walk out”?

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Midway through, things pivot from grim crime saga toward outright horror fantasy. A teenage girl is gunned down on video, only to reanimate in pixelated glitch-cam footage as detectives shrug it off as “technical issues.” The murderer, now revealed as Leslie Sykes, a.k.a. “Mr. Shiny” (Jessee J. Clarkson), goes international – Jerusalem, Iraq, Germany – studying the occult, astrology, maybe trying to summon an ancient god or, who knows, a cosmic slug. Because sure. Why not?

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By the time the finale rolls around – on Friday the 13th, with a kidnapped baby and the literal stars aligning – the film has tossed true crime, Blair Witch-style found footage, and Ancient Aliens mysticism into the blender. For viewers who dream of mashing up Dateline with Paranormal Activity, this might sound like a Reese’s Cup of genres. For the rest of us, it’s just sticky, weirdly hammy excess.

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The movie’s last spoken line is, “There's still so many things we don't understand about this case – and probably never will. We just have bits and pieces of some kind of strange puzzle. And, even if we could put them all together, I don't know if I want to see whatever picture they make.”

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That’s exactly how Strange Harvest lands: Disjointed, incoherent, and ultimately unnecessary.