By Geno McGahee
Over the years, the SyFy network has not given the horror fans a reason to get excited. The bad and overused CGI and ridiculous storylines made most of their releases easy to ignore. When I see a film with the “SyFy” logo on it, I typically avoid it and keep moving, but dammit, I love scarecrows. SCARECROWS is a made for TV, SyFy production and it follows the same formula that most of their films do. There is a lot of CGI, but they actually got some things right here.
We begin with the story of an urban legend of a scarecrow that has terrorized the community for 100 years, giving birth to a scarecrow festival. Aaron Harris (Robin Dunne) is a high school teacher that is punishing his bad students by having them fix up his ex-girlfriend, Kristen’s (Lacey Chabert) family farm. Unfortunately, she is linked to this killing force. Her great grandfather found a way to bury it but it has returned and now this group must face it and deal with its rage.
This scarecrow is not your normal scarecrow. Normally and ideally, we see a guy in a scarecrow costume raising hell, but this is SyFy and they cannot live unless the monster is a CGI creation. This CGI scarecrow isn’t really a scarecrow. He’s just this demonic thing made out of tree branches, but he is cool looking and it seems that the SyFy network have hired better CGI guys.
The group is now being killed off one by one and the action does happen quickly. Usually, there is a slow build and the monster isn’t shown until the midpoint to the final act of the film, but not here. They decided that we are jumping right into the action and, in all honesty, this film relies on the action to keep it going. There isn’t much to it. I think the point was to just make a fun movie and they did accomplish that, but you sort of feel empty after you watch it. It’s really forgettable.
There is one awesome scene, and the editor knew it, where Kristen and Aaron made it to a boatyard and go to see the security guard for help. A security guard in a horror film? You know where this is going. They find him and his face is ripped off and it looks like he was screaming, which makes sense. I mean, if a demon came and ripped your face off, I think the natural thing would be to scream. I feel bad for security guards that are in horror and action films. They never make it. They are considered very expendable.
In case you forget what the guy with the ripped off face looks like, we cut back about a dozen times. I don’t blame them. It was fucking impressive and the boatyard is a cool place to have the final battle. I found it really amusing when Kristen was calling out the scarecrow, banging on things with her axe and yelling at the top of her lungs. Overacting works when you are facing off against a CGI beast.
SCARECROW isn’t a great film and it doesn’t feel like a scarecrow movie, but it is worth a watch. I found myself laughing a lot and enjoying the overacting and action sequences. They did go out there to make a film that the audience would enjoy rather than one that they just slapped interesting cover art on to sell, which would leave the viewer angry that they spent their cash on it. I recommend this one. I bought it for 10 bucks at Best Buy and I am going to say something that you may not believe: it was worth it. Good job SyFy!
Rating: 7/10
