Scarecrows

For a low budget suspense flick this isn't half bad. It has a lot of good atmosphere, decent gore(I've seen gorier though.), and pretty likeable characters. This one's about a military gang that steals money from their own base and hide out in the cornfeilds where they are killed of by zombie scarecrows. Good story, and effects. *** out of *****. Good for a Friday or Saturday night.

Scarecrows shows what you can do with a very flimsy plot line and a low budget. Rather than concentrate on characters or story, the film leans more towards aesthetics; as the tale is portrayed within a very creepy atmosphere, and the central monsters of the title capitalise well on their natural scare factor. Like clowns, scarecrows are eerie creations and it's clear that director William Wesley knows that, as their dark and foreboding image makes up the backbone of this tale of terror. The only real theme that is put on display in this film comes from the idea of greed, as it is that very thing that gets all the central protagonists into life-threatening danger. The film follows a bunch of soldiers that have stolen a lot of money. They take a pilot and his daughter hostage and force the pair to take them to Mexico; but the ride has a hitch when one of the crooks decides that he doesn't want to share the money, and parachutes out of the plane with the loot. His partners in crime are soon on his tail, but the story has another twist when it turns out that the field they've jumped into is infested with scarecrows that want to do more than keep the birds off the crops!

This film isn't very well known and it's not hard to see why. Scarecrows is very short, running at about seventy minutes when you don't include the credit sequences. The film also feels very low-key, as the focus is more on the atmosphere than anything else, which can leave the film lacking at several intervals. Scarecrows is basically a glorified zombie movie, and pretty much plays out like one as the characters are picked off by their unworldly adversaries. The fact that the entire film takes place in what appears to be real time and in only one location ensures that it benefits from a claustrophobic tension, which benefits a film like this greatly. There isn't a lot of gore here, as the killings don't tend to be very bloodthirsty, and most of the violence takes place off-screen. The killings aren't bad, however, and I was impressed with the way that the film handled the scarecrows' victims after they had been savaged. Overall, this film certainly won't win any awards, and you won't really be missing much by not seeing it; but any horror fan that gets the chance to see Scarecrows probably won't be disappointed.

A Joe Pesci look alike and his military friends rob and kidnap a father/daughter combo, escaping in a jet airplane. During flight, one of the robbers grabs the loot and parachutes onto a farm haunted by demonic scarecrows. They land, and it becomes obvious that the human characters here don't matter, scarecrows are the main draw.

It's super low-budget without showing too much, and the acting is very b-movie in an enjoyable way. Unfortunately, the story is just a set up to have guys with guns get sneakily picked off by alie.. I mean predato.. I mean scarecrows.

But the simple plot works through decent effects, competent direction, and the scarecrows themselves. (They're near invulnerable, wield knives, pitchforks, cleavers, and sew people full of leaves to make them into zombified slaves.)

There's some genuinely creepy moments and some laughable schlock. If you don't go in expecting much, this can be a fun ride.

Man, what a horror movie! The idea about killer scarecrows may turn a lot of people off by sounding cheezy, but this is talented filmmaking by people who knew what to do, and, best of all, what NOT to do. The dark, quiet, breezy cornfields of a deserted-looking rural area, with no one around for who knows how many miles, is served with some great creepy atmosphere. The music helps, with a lot of the soundtrack's more sedated moments being the creepiest of all. The gore and visual shocks are very detailed and well-done, but they are kept to a minimum for a lot of the running time. Still, as they say, when it rains, it pours! The acting is great, and the writers did the right thing when they knew NOT to try to give any explanation for how the killer scarecrows came to be other than as much as the characters can figure out (a cleverly vague theory about a family that had been living on the farm who were probably in league with Satan). A lot of great powers are wielded by the scarecrows, including the exact imitation of victims' voices and the ability to reanimate their victims for use to their own fiendish means. There is some humor, but it's character-to-character banter rather than any type of comedy. This is no goofy movie by any means. It really also creeped me out about how the scarecrows move with a sort of stealth, and silently run right up behind a character and off them in seconds, without warning. I had some serious trouble sleeping after this one, but that is a compliment. Not many movies have been able to do that with me, and even fewer are ones I still found enjoyable enough to search down in a used video store and shell out ten bucks to buy. I would only recommend the unrated version, but this is one of those movies that is hard to find in its rated version, so if you come across it, it will probably be unrated. Creepy, creepy stuff, the best way to describe this sadly overlooked masterpiece of horror cinema.

A lot of horror fans seem to love Scarecrows, so I won't be very popular in saying that I found it to be rather boring. The idea behind it was interesting, but it seems to drag so much. I think the main problem is that it is all set in darkness. Sometimes horror films set in darkness can work (such as Humongous), but Scarecrows is in darkness for the whole film. A lot of the time it's hard to figure out what's actually happening, and although some shots of the scarecrows were creepy, most were hard to even see. If a little more lighting had been used, perhaps it could've been better.

There's not many films involving killer scarecrows to my knowledge, apart from Dark Night Of The Scarecrow, which is much better. I would recommend that over Scarecrows any day.