Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 7:1	Budget Medium

You got to love a director that slams other horror directors who include “silly T&A” in their movies and congratulates himself for not including any nudity in his movie. Damn, I wish I had known that before I got the movie.

We open with a car driving down a lonely country road. Ominously the engine dies and the car coasts to a stop by a cornfield. As the motorist tries to get the car running, he is speared through the stomach and dies. The blood is not even done spurting before we discover that this prologue is just part of a story being told by some stoners in the very same cornfield. Soon the head stoner returns to the story and we met our geek hero. Needless to say, he is bullied by the other students at the school and foolishly asks the head cheerleader (actually the only cheerleader, it is a very small school) to the prom. Tiffany Shepis’ character befriends him, not because she likes him but because she does not like to see him being picked on and our hero takes it the wrong way. When he sees Tiffany kissing one of his tormentors, he runs home only to find his mom having sex with some loser. When he attacks her lover, he is chased through a cornfield and killed at the feet of a scarecrow. Soon the townspeople are dropping like flies as the scarecrow kills not only people who tormented our hero, but pretty much anyone else he runs across. Eventually the scarecrow tries to take on Tiffany and she lights him up.

Okay, so no nudity in this one. I can live with that if I have to but the director replaced it with random shots of scenery. Seriously, we get long shots of sunsets, the cornfield, the various streets of the town and the trailer park. I wonder if he thinks he is taking the moral high ground here. In a movie where the villain slays one of his victims with a frying pan. Yeah, right.

One of the real problems with this movie is that the age of the actors is significantly greater than their characters ages. Presumably we are talking about 16 or 17 year old kids. Our hero is at least 30 and his schoolmates all look to be deep into their 20s. Making matters even worse is that our hero’s mom looks to be about his age. You would think that at some point the director would look up at a read through and go “Woah! You guys are way too fucking old to play high school kids!”. But no. There is no real reason to set the story in high school, the dynamic of a loser being picked on by the local punks does not end with graduation. Set the school scenes in the local eatery and the age discrepancy disappears. Failing that at least take the wedding ring off the guy in the cornfield.

Pacing is a real problem with this movie as well. During the 80s there were lots of travelogue sex movies where the director would set the story in Hong Kong so that he could get paid to go on vacation. These movies would have long scenes of scenery interspaced with scenes involving naked women and sometimes scenery shots with naked women in them. As there was never much of a plot to start with, this was never a significant problem. In Scarecrow, however, the director is probably trying to offset the violence with pretty pictures. Yeah, it is a pretty common device designed to contrast the mundane with unbridled violence. Sort of like showing pictures of an alien vivisection and then pictures of kittens. Of course this can look suspiciously like filler.

I know it is a lot to ask, but I would have liked some sense of why these things were happening. I suppose that the scarecrow was just a husk (sorry) that accepted the departing soul of our hero and that it took a while before the scarecrow completely took over, which would explain why Mom was spared. It is pretty clear that this is the set up for a series of films and that the entire early story is just a throw away plot device to get the scarecrow front and center.

Normally one denouement is enough for a movie but not for Scarecrow. First we get updates on what the survivors are up to with Tiffany displaying some reality issues and our hero’s mom shown pregnant again. So now there are two possible spin off points as we return to our narrators (the stoners) in the cornfield only to find out that storyteller is pimping for the scarecrow who shows up and kills the others. That’s right. The writer and director gave themselves three different starting points for a second movie.

I am not overly thrilled with the choice of victims here either. Again, this speaks to the director’s lack of interest in the backstory. Four of the victims had harassed our hero, but most of the others were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The graveyard caretaker is a good example, the guy buried him, sure, but after he was dead (and I think this is an important point; burying someone before they are dead is certainly justification for returning from the dead to seek revenge).

Scarecrow just strikes me as being way too disjointed. The disparity between what the hero starts as and what he becomes is too great. The randomness of the victims, the multiple sequel story threads, all have a haphazard feel that a better director could have pulled together. That being said, the movie is reasonably well done. I got a good chuckle out of the speech by the teacher who can barely stand the kids when she is at school and she certainly does not want to even think about them after hours. Also, it has Ms. Shepis in it, which is almost certainly the reason I watched it. True to form Tiffany continues acting in the tradition of such B movie greats as Linnea Quiggley and Maria Ford, chewing the crap out of the scenery and mug furiously for the camera.

As B movies go, this is not terrible. Most of the things that annoy me are relatively easy to ignore and you end up with a reasonably amusing dead teenager movie. Still there are a lot of problems with the movie that could have been fixed with just a little bit of time and effort.

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