31 Days of Horror: Scream & Shout! Day 2

Scarecrows (1988)

What's It About?

A group of paramilitary thieves rob a military bases' payroll offices and a escape on a plane with a pilot and his teenage daughter.  When one of the men bails out over a rural area the others pursue him only to find a house and a cemetary teeming with scarecrows who proceed to come to life and begin picking off the robbers one by one, turning them into human scarecrows.

Is it Any Good?

Scarecrows is more-or-less a good movie.  It's got a solid hook: bank robbers versus killer zombie scarecrows and director/co-writer William Wesley peppers the film with some great creepy elements.  An abandoned farmhouse, an overgrown field filled with scarecrows on crosses, a room filled with stuffed crows put in elaborate poses to signify some sort of satanic ritual.  The creep factor is high here and the entire movie takes place in the dark (give or take a few dodgy day-for-night shots, some of which are disguised with a green filter to signify night vision goggles.)

The scarecrows themselves are suitably upsetting looking, combing your traditional scarecrow qualities of sacks on heads and straw stuffed clothing with decaying faces and sewn-on body parts underneath.  The human scarecrows that they make of the robbers as they're picked off one-by-one are particularly unnerving, especially the one I chose for the preview image on the main page.  There's even an added extra disturbing element where the scarecrows can mimic the voice of someone that their victim cares about to lure them into their clutches.  They're brutal in their kills; sawing off limbs, stabbing with pitchforks, going at people with knives and sickles.  There's not as much gore as I expected there to be considering the violent way the scarecrows behave but there's still plenty of severed limbs and hollowed out body cavities stuffed with straw.

Scarecrows does seem to be missing something though, and what that something is is difficult to pin down.  The protagonists are more likeable than I expected them to be and while our teenage final girl isn't anything special she's not a weak point.  I don't even mind that we never find out what the deal with the scarecrows and the weird house is, we know it's some sort of black magic ritual and that's all we really need to know.  Ultimately the film just feels unfulfilling.  Stephen King says that some of the story ideas he comes up with don't get committed to paper because they're like a cup without a handle.  Essentially a cup can be wonderful all on its own but without a handle it just won't reach its full potential.  Scarecrows feels like a cup without a handle, what that handle would be I cannot answer.  Maybe give us just a few more breadcrumbs about what the scarecrows are doing or do something more with the robbers or the girl.  I couldn't say.  This same issue plagues William Wesley's spiritual sequel to Scarecrows, 2001's Route 666.  This is a good movie but I can see why it's not in the canon of great '80s horror.

Oh well, at least now you know where those killer scarecrows in Cabin in the Woods came from.

Watch, Toss, or Buy?

Scarecrows is a pretty decent movie but it's a little sparse and not terribly compelling so I'm going to say give it a watch and decide for yourself.