Scarecrows

This films plays like its been cobbled together from a number of other films. The opening scenes, with a paramilitary group stealing 3.5 million dollars from the army, has the look and feel of John Carpenter’s classic Assault on Precinct 13. Once we move ahead to the shack out in the woods, they start getting attacked by scarecrows that look like the decayed, nasty zombies you’d see in Italian horror movies, but who go around killing everyone as though they were standard slasher villains.

While there are moments where the film manages to achieve a nice tone, but the constant switcheroos of how the movie plays keeps undermining that effort, and the acting does not help in any way. Put simply, the girl playing Kelly, who I guess we’re supposed to be rooting for since she’s a kidnapping victim while the rest of the cast are her kidnappers (except for her dad, but he dies right away so he doesn’t count), is a terrible actress, and she brings down any scene she has lines in. She manages no range at all beyond wide eyed panic, which starts to grate on the nerves so quickly you begin to actively want them to throw her to the killer scarecrows just to be done with her. This is not to say that the rest of the cast is much better, as they aren’t, but compared to her they may as well be part of a professional Shakespearean troupe.

There are a couple more major flaws with the film, like how everyone is so beyond stupid that, even after the scarecrows are found to be openly tossing bait on the ground to lure people over to be killed, everyone still goes rushing after whatever bait they drop, over and over and over again, or the fact that it takes them two thirds of the film before the characters finally figure out that the scarecrows are killing everyone (to be fair, given that the scarecrows are apparently fast enough that they can steal the engine out of a car that’s in motion, they may have been a bit more capable of covering their tracks than the average horror monsters). It’s just a pretty lame movie all around, don’t check it out.