Main cast: Lacey Chabert (Kristen Miller), Robin Dunne (Aaron Harris), Nicole Muñoz (Maria), Brittney Wilson (Beth), and Carlo Marks (Eddie)
Director: Sheldon Wilson
Scarecrow is one of those movies that were on constant rotation in the only cable channel on the TV when I was enjoying my stay at the ward recently, and in the few days I was in there, this show came on three times. It’s crazy. They must be selling this movie at a crazy discounted price to all cable channels that require cheap padding to their catalogues.
There have been many movies about scarecrow monsters. Some are decent, some are terrible, and this one falls squarely into the latter camp.
The plot is standard horror movie fare. It opens with some dumb teens getting attacked while planning some tracks to play on some other teens in a big old barn in the middle of a cornfield. The guy is killed, and the gal… well, her fate is initially portrayed as some kind of cliffhanger that one should watch the movie to find out, but I’ll spare everyone the trouble: she is completely irrelevant to the plot and gets killed off-screen eventually. Did anyone say “padding”?
The “real” story is about this teacher, Aaron Harris, that brings some kids that are under detention to this barn to retrieve a scarecrow for the upcoming “Scarecrow Festival”. Apparently, the place is long deserted and has a morbid reputation—30 people had died in there, under mysterious circumstances—which makes it the perfect sense to bring the naughty kids to. Just imagine the lawsuits when these kids get killed!
Also at the place is Aaron’s ex, Kristen, and her new beau Eddie. It turns out that the barn belongs to her family, and she… brings Eddie to help Aaron and six students collect a scarecrow? Wait, how big is that scarecrow anyway to need nine people to pull it up and take it back to the bus?
Oh well, who cares, as the monster responsible for all the deaths—a scarecrow, naturally—gets annoyed by how stupid the plot is and decides to just kill everyone ASAP so that the whole thing can end quickly.
Still, the scarecrow monster will have to take a backseat when it comes to the true horror of this movie, because that honor belongs to the incessant, relentless stupidity of the human characters that do everything they can to eliminate themselves without much effort on the monster’s part.
From leaving the keys in the ignition of a bus while Aaron gets off the bus and lets the kids remain behind to these people constantly splitting up and arguing even when their lives are in danger, the true cause of death for pretty much most of these characters is their own terminal dumbness. Seriously, these people can’t stop to think or cooperate to save their own lives, in this case literally.
Worse, this movie treats self-preservation as a moral failure. One character nearly died at the scarecrow’s hands, and spends the rest of the film trying to save themselves no matter what. Instead of relating to their trauma, the other characters berate this character for being “selfish” and not… whatever it is that they think this character should do, because the movie sure didn’t make it clear what this character is supposed to do.
Even better, once it becomes clear that the monster is the result of a curse tied to Kristen’s family, and being around her means certain death, this movie treats any character that wants to run the other direction away from her as some kind of “coward”. Well, that’s great, if the movie at the same time didn’t have those non-cowardly characters die anyway for being around Kristen, so I have no idea at the end of the day what the movie is actually trying to tell me.
Anyway, practically everyone in this movie is too dumb to live and meet their well-deserved ends in this movie. Still, it’s not a satisfying watch, as my blood pressure keeps rising with every passing second of this movie. Is this something that should be shown to people that are recuperating in a hospital ward?
