There are any number of things that people are scared of. Corpses, snakes, spiders, dogs, peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth... The list really is endless. Way back in the day, mankind found a lot of missing corn from their fields and made man-shaped dummies out of old clothes and straw to try and give the thieving Crows the idea that a man was watching the corn. These "Scare Crows" were completely unsuccessful for the most part, because Crows are smarter than that, but they did have a lot of success scaring the bejeesus out of human beings, who are apparently not as smart as crows. A number of movies featuring scarecrows have been made over the years, probably the best of which was a quiet, B-horror flick made back in the late 80's called, strangely enough, Scarecrows.
This isn't that movie. This movie was just made by Syfy in 2013. Starring Lacey Chabert of... um.... okay, Lost in Space is the only movie I can remember seeing her in, but there you go. So here's the story. Lacey's character's family owns a farm. She comes back for the annual Scarecrow festival to sell the farm, as she's low on cash. Also, she's come back to see if her old boyfriend still has the hots for her. Her old boyfriend, as it turns out, is escorting a bunch of school-aged miscreants to disassemble the old scarecrow from Lacey's farm and bring it into town for the festival. Lacey's farm was the original site of the festival, and, as it turns out, the original site of the horror that happened many years ago that the festival is supposed to be making sure everyone remembers. But of course, everyone has forgotten. In fact, nobody even relates, at any point in this movie, what actually happened all those years ago to get the festival started, or where the scarecrow came from. Needless to say, there's a monstrous Scarecrow that was imprisoned under Lacey's farm, and some idiots gone and done let the thing out. So by the time Mr. Schoolteacher, Lacey's ex beau, shows up with his half a dozen students trying to work off their detention, the Scarecrow is already loose. Lacey arrives just in time to let her old boyfriend know she still has the hots for him, and then the killing starts.
Since it's a SyFy movie, you know there's no nudity, a little gore, and the creature is computer generated. Come to think of it, it looks suspiciously like the Mothman monster from the Mothman movie SyFy made a few years back, only without the wings. There's a tiny bit of backstory going on to show you what each of the characters is like before things start going haywire, but there's no character development going on. There IS a lot of action. Once the first killing starts, there's pretty much an endless chase scene from that point of the movie til the end. You have to wonder at the logic of creating a movie monster with no back story, no weaknesses and no character, but Syfy gone and done it. Also, none of the characters really has any motivations for doing what they are doing, as far as I can tell. There's a guy filling a notebook with pictures of a girl, only, according to the story, the girl only just moved to town. There's a smart girl who's attending her first detention, but nothing on why she's there. There's a couple obvious criminals who are so obvious about being bad that it's a wonder they aren't already in jail instead of being in detention. There's a jock that's so happy and helpful, you wonder what the hell he did to get tossed into that situation. Plus, how the hell did the new girl get detention so fast? This movie doesn't give you a lot of reasons for what's happening and why, I'll say that much.
The acting is average, I suppose. If LifeTime network is where old actresses go to make romance movies, Syfy is where out of work actors go to make horror flicks. I can't say as I was moved to tears over any of the acting in this movie. It's not Gone With the Wind. There's not much scenery to look at, a few shots of a farm and a barn, a forest, and somehow, there's an old boat graveyard in the middle of this dried up old river. With a boat on it big enough to have lifeboats? Apparently, SyFy is also where old Cruise ships go to die. And here I thought the Mediterranean Sea was where old cruise ships went to roll ov, err, die. Guess I was wrong! How a big-ass old ship got to the muddy edge of a river in some backwoods community with a scarecrow festival, I'll never know. And amazingly, there's a guard shack at the boat graveyard! In the middle of farking nowhere, with no roads out to it, no bridges anywhere near it, there's a bunch of old boats rusting to death on the edges of a dried up old river... and there's a guard shack? With an actual guard in it? lol Makes no goddamn sense. Really doesn't. What the hell is he guarding? There's no roads! No bridge! Even if there isn't anything valuable to guard, and he's just there to warn off the kids, how the HELL did he get there? lol His shack is barely big enough to turn around in! He doesn't live there! Who the hell pays him? Why not just put up a damn fence or a sign? lol I guess we'll never know. Utterly ridiculous. I don't know who the hell wrote this drivel, but come on. No backstory for the monster, little backstory for the main characters, no monster weaknesses to exploit, how the hell do we even know how to kill the thing? Will it be back for Scarecrow 2: Electric Boogaloo? I hope not.
Well, I guess I wasn't really fond of that movie. lol The actresses were mostly cute, probably the film's only good point. And, I suppose, the long-ass chase scene from near-start to the end. Shit, I can't even tell you if anyone or anything survived. It was that vague! lol if you get the chance to see it on Syfy sometime in the future, maybe someone could let me know how it turned out, because all I got to see at the end wasn't the monster, wasn't the survivors, no, all I got to see was that ridiculous goddamn guard shack, in the middle of nowhere, guarding nothing from nobody! lol Hell if I know what the point of that movie was. I can't really recommend watching it again. It'd probably just confuse me more a second time.
Man, give me a good old reliable werewolf movie, where you know either the werewolf is going to kill everybody or it's going to die at the end. Maybe tomorrow night I can actually get back to the werewolves. I hear Howling VI isn't as bad as I feared, and there's another werewolf movie in my netflix queue as well. Til tomorrow, horror fans!
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