HERE WE GO WITH A CRAPTACULAR MARATHON WITH EIGHT CREEPY HORROR MO... OOPS, I DID THAT ONE. SEVEN! SEVEN CREEPY HORROR MO... OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN - I MEAN I DID THAT ONE. SIX! SIX CREEPY HORROR MO... NO WAIT, THAT ONE IS THE FOURTH OF A SERIES AND I DIDN'T DO THE FIRST THREE... FIVE! FIVE CREEPY HORROR MO... YA KNOW WHAT? LET'S JUST TAKE 'EM ONE AT A TIME, SHALL WE?

Scarecrow (2002)

I know what you're thinking: 'Oh please, let her have gotten the date wrong and this is actually the 1973 movie starring Gene Hackman and Al Pacino... dammit! Um, okay, is this some Batman mo... dammit! Okay, let's have the 2013 made-for-TV Sy Fy treat (cough cough) starring Lacy Chabert, please? DAMMIT!'

Trust me, I'd have much rather done the quirky but interesting sounding Hackman/Pacino flick, even watch Lacy Chabert (whom, among other characters, did the voices of 'Meg' in the first season of Family Guy and 'Eliza Thornberry' in The Wild Thornberrys). But no, sorry. But don't worry, maybe the review will be shorter than my overblown title on top. Maybe. This movie can be found (and this is a warning by the way) in the movie collection 'Midnight Horror: Terror & Torment. I can only assume that they meant it to be terror and torment for the one watching these horrible things.

Three boys are sitting around in the middle of a cornfield because, you know, that's what teenage boys like to do everywhere, all of the time. Seriously. Somewhere there's got to be a cornfield with three bored teenage boys trying to scare each other with stupid stories. No? Well in this movie there is so get used to it. One boy says he has a really scary story they have to listen to the end to get the neat twist. DONE! 

My horror movie worksheet (patent pending) was mostly filled while the beginning credits were running and finished when this line was spoken. If you don't get what the 'twist' could possibly be, you haven't been paying attention to me. Tsk, tsk. And the non-story begins:

This is your typical high school boy in his thirties getting bullied by popular high school kids pushing forty, with a drunk and loose mom. He gets aggressive with her, uh, current liason and the 90 pound weakling gets his windpipe crushed by her boyfriend conveniently in a cornfield that seems to be smack in the middle of this town (and right by the run-down trailer park he lives in) so that he dies staring up at a scarecrow he's been talking to. No I am NOT going to explain that. 


The killer uses a piece of rope he conveniently carries with him just in case he's going to murder somebody and needs to stage a suicide, and he and the boy's mother put him up a tree. The police, being... nothing really, don't notice that geez, there's no way he could've gotten up there. Meh. I'm looking for sense in this? The only person nice to him is a hinted-at lesbian in the film. How do we know she's a lesbian? She has her hair cut really short and wears a tank top. Offensive much?

I sometimes talk about stuff like editing and lighting and sound (not much, those things are boring) but the editing was soooo bad I thought I was going to have a seizure. In several scenes, it was like they had to do it more than a couple of times but thought 'aw screw it, I ain't gonna make all those takes match up' so the scene just jumps in front of your eyes here - there - over there - back here, all within the space of a few seconds. It was nauseating. Oh and the movie was awful too.

After Lester (yes, that's his name folks) dies, we get a nice shot of a most touching headline, pictured here. Now fake newspapers in movies are usually pretty stupid (most have it filled with nonsense, few bother to run letters backwards like this one does) but the title was funny enough: Emerald Grove Youth Takes His Own Life - Graduation Proceeds As Planned. Phew, that's relief, I was afraid for a moment there that his death was going to be inconvenient. 

This guy got his toupee' and mustache from Wal Mart...

But the backward and forward phrases repeated over and over include the words 'you'll be dead soon', 'carving up victims', and 'killer scarecrow'. Wow, they think you're soooo stupid that you need non-too-subtle hints at what you're going to be watching for the rest of the movie. Unfortunately.

Time passes. How much? I don't know, they don't say and I'm not going to make this longer by looking it up.

Olympic scarecrow gymnast contender...

So Lester the molester... sorry, I mean the dead dude goes from loser to karate and gymnastic expert SUPER SCARECROW, able to leap cars in a single bound, do backflips all the way down the street, bring out double scythes from nowhere, slice your head cleaaaaan off, then tuck the scythes... somewhere. Oh, he's also got a different voice and tries to make jokes like Freddy Krueger. He fails.

All the idiots that pissed him off get killed one by one (the owner of the cornfield says 'I TOLD YOU SO!' but never divulges what he supposedly told them) until he faces off with the  les... uh, the girl with short hair. Supposedly the girl wins, setting him on fire (Oh no, his one weakness!).

So we're back to the three boys and the one telling the story says it's time for the BIG TWIST... and if you can't guess what that is, I certainly ain't gonna tell you and I'm ashamed of you. Tsk, tsk.

                        

LESS THAN ZERO




Night Of The Scarecrow (1995)

Teenagers are stupid and deserve to die. At least in horror movies. This less less less than zero piece of garbage was supposedly set in Washington (that usually means British Columbia) but this particular horrid movie was made in California. And there's cornfields. Lots of cornfields. See, in bad horror movies, if kids are going to break into a building, it's an abandoned hospital, asylum or prison. If they're going to be in the country, they're in a cornfield. You don't hear of teenagers getting slaughtered in the strawberry fields, or wheat - it's always corn.

The hubby explained to me that it's because corn is tall and you can get lost. So if they ever increase their genetic mutations of our food sources to other vegetables and we get seven foot tall cucumber patches, watch out. And if you don't have corn (he said patiently like I was an idiot and he wasn't far off) you don't have scarecrows, which everybody is about as afraid of as guys with machetes or chainsaws. Okay, okay, point taken but this was still stupid.

It has a long back story but basically the townspeople were desperate for good crops and willing to let a warlock of some kind work magic so they could have lots of good crops. But like every other story where people do something bad to get something good, as soon as they got it they turned on the warlock, trapping him in the cornfield forever. Or at least until some dumb drunk kid messes with farming equipment and breaks the 'seal' that is holding him down and he rises. Oh please kill 'em quick.

So as a scarecrow he rises and starts killing. He's trying to find a book to become a real boy again. But first he has to bore us for 85 minutes. Two try to stop him and we really root for them. Nah, just kidding - I'm hoping for quick deaths. There are bad puns throughout this turkey, a deputy with a six shooter that he apparently got from the magic firearm store 'cause he shot a lot more than six times.


Now I expect to get a lot of flack for this review - it's been called one of the best scarecrow movies of the 1990's. By somebody. Somewhere. Not me. And trust me, not you. And if you DO think this is a good movie, just don't post it on your Facebook page, 'kay? Potential employers look at that stuff.

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