You can keep your werewolves and Frankenstein monsters and Freddy Kruegers and even the Boogens; for my money, the best movie monster of all is the killer scarecrow. All I ask is that the scarecrow be scary, and that it recognizably be a scarecrow. None of that avart-garde nonsense is what I'm getting at here.
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| Ah, yes. Terrifying. |
So, as we open, taxpayer resources are being casually squandered to bus a scant half-dozen high school students to Saturday detention, which, in this movie's world, is held at a haunted farm. Because that's not stupid. Before you can do the Molly Ringwald though an evil scarecrow is dragging these punks off into the corn, and oh my god can you imagine the lawsuit? "You took my teenage daughter where? And she was eaten by what? After having sex with Mr. Satan who?" The movie initially adopts the trite-and-true "barricaded-in-the-old-house" format, wherein the good guys spend the entire running time barricaded inside some building or another while something else tries to get in, which is inarguably a good way to save money on sets and trying, but tends to get old pretty fast. Fortunately, they are ousted from their stronghold in fairly short order, but then they just end up running around the woods so I'm not sure if that's one for the "win" column or not. There's not much atmosphere (too much of this movie takes place during the day), and not only is our monster a cartoon, but it looks and behaves less like a scarecrow and more like the ghost of a really pissed-off tree, and most closely resembles the comic book version of Swamp Thing. What did I say about the avart-garde shit? Dammit, I really wanted to like this one, but they screwed up nearly everything. If they only had a brain...
----------For your Halloween reading pleasure...
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