Well I watched Scarecrow, and although I can't recommend it, I will say that the trailer included on the disc for the movie is one of the better trailers I've seen for a B-grade movie, and I'm not being ironic. It's got great editing and a decent soundtrack behind it, and it does it's job, which is to get people interested in seeing the flick. Unfortunately, I never saw the trailer before I bought this little gem for $9.99 at Walmart, I just let curiosity get the better of me due to the lack of a rating on the cover (which goes against Walmart's usual policy of not stocking unrated material) and the presence of hot hot chick Tiffany Shepis.
Whew, those are some long sentences!
Anyway, the movie itself has all the failings of your average filmed-on-a-weekend-by-a-second-time-director-and-lousy-nepotistic-cast-super-cheapo outing. Bad bad dialogue that goes nowhere, very little plot to speak of, and a real lack of any reason to exist beyond the fairly cool Scarecrow creature design and the gory deaths. It's all told in flashback by a dude sitting in a cornfield smoking a jay and trying to creep out his buddies. Needless to say, said guy gives away the surprise ending completely by telling his buddies to watch out for "a surprise ending" to his story.
But I get ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning where two dudes are sitting in the cornfield being told a scary story by a third dude. The story is about Lester, a put-upon young loner/creepy guy who gets just the worst treatment from everybody at his high school. He's the dude everybody loves to pick on, mostly because he looks like he's about 25 years too old to be attending high school. To me he looks like a slightly aged and thinner Gavin Rossdale with a shorter haircut. So Lester is a depressed young artist type who just isn't understood by his peers. The only person who attempts to understand him is Judie, played by Tiffany Shepis. She's a tough and sassy lesbian-lite type of gal, but she's got a soft spot in her heart for Lester and doesn't like it when he's picked on by the airheads and jocks at school. All of this torment and self-esteem building adds to Lester's isolation. He gets no better treatment on the home front from his heavy boozing trailer-trash mom and her abusive boyfriend du jour.
We can tell Lester is coming close to his boiling point with all of this abuse. When he sees his new girfriend (in his mind anyway) Judie kissing the #1 jock boy outside a party, Lester does the big flipout and runs away. This scene is what the behavioral science guys who track serial killers would call Lester's triggering circumstance. Lester heads home, but on the way he decides to go beat on a scarecrow in the neighboring cornfield with a baseball bat. Lester thinks the scarecrow has it made, because it can't be hurt. When he arrives home, Lester finds his mom and her hillbilly lover playing Scrabble. No wait, he finds them tenderizing the rump roast doggie-style. Either way they aren't aren't very good at the game. Lester goes off on the boyfriend, who doesn't like being interrupted during coitis. The boyfriend drags Lester to the cornfield and strangles him under the scarecrow. During his last moments of life, Lester looks up at the scarecrow and has some kind of soul transfer with it as he dies.
Here's where the fun begins. Lester, as the scarecrow, comes down from his perch some months later and begins to exact his wardrobe-staining revenge on all the people who made him feel bad in his past life. Much hacking and heart-ripping ensues until only a select few cast members are left. It doesn't really matter which ones.
I'd like to say that this movie is a classic example of a revenge horror flick, a la Friday the 13th or even The Toxic Avenger. I won't say that though, because this movie is crap. Lester-crow has the moves of a second-rate kung fu master and the not-witty dialogue of a late-series Freddy Krueger. He kills basically at random and without any logical direction, so to say he's trying to get revenge on his tormentors would be misleading. He's just enjoying immortality by killing for fun.
He's also not very thorough. When he has the chance to kill some teens making kissy-kissy out in his cornfield, he only picks off one of them, when I know he could have taken them all one by one. Later, when he's perfectly able to kill another young woman after pulling the chest plunger on her guy friend, he just runs away instead. Seems the scarecrow is still that confused teen named Lester on the inside, not knowing what he really wants out of life. In the end, Lester loses again. Or does he? Could there be a sequel in the works, and if so, would we be confused enough to watch it?
Tiffany Shepis stands out in a no-name cast, but only for her good looks. A couple of the cast members put in overtime as more than one character, and with bad disguises at that. What can I say, overall it's a lousy horror movie on par with any of the other lousy low-budget horror movies out there. I recommend this for fans of Shepis (and sexy chicks in general, although you wouldn't call this an erotic horror movie, if you get my drift) and gorehounds only. One of the local DVD trading places will surely give a few bucks for it.
