Amityville Scarecrow

Now, the word "Amityville" has been a synonym for a low budget, dubious produced movie of questionable entertainment value, yet I keep returning here to watch, hoping for this particular one time is that one time where an "Amityville" movie is a good "Amityville" movie.

And thus, I opted to sit down and watch the 2021 movie "Amityville Scarecrow" from writer Shannon Holiday and director Jack Peter Mundy. I have to be bluntly honest and say that I harbored zero expectations really for this movie, so writer Shannon Holiday and director Jack Peter Mundy had every chance to impress, bedazzle, and most importantly, entertain me.

However they failed to do that. "Amityville Scarecrow" was a slow paced movie driven by an almost non-existing narrative. So it was insanely difficult to find anything worthwhile or enjoyable here as the movie trotted on at a pace that would put a snail to shame.

The acting performances in the movie were fairly wooden and not overly convincing. It felt staged and amateurish at best. There were some familiar faces on the cast list though with Kate Sandison and Nicola Wright, but that is only because I watch way too many low budget B-movies.

For a horror movie then "Amityville Scarecrow" was a swing and a miss. There was nothing scary here at all, unless you consider the insanely slow pacing of the narrative as being scary. So if you enjoy horror movies, you will not be in for a particular treat here, should you opt to watch "Amityville Scarecrow", which I don't recommend you do - some of us suffered through this, so you don't have to.

Visually then "Amityville Scarecrow" was not impressive either.

My rating of "Amityville Scarecrow" lands on a two out of ten stars.

This film begins with two estranged sisters named "Mary" (Kate Sandison) and "Tina" (Amanda Jade-Tyler) meeting to discuss the will their mother left behind after her death. More specifically, their concern revolves around a campground which Mary wants to sell while Tina wants to renovate and expand upon it instead. Of course, considering that Tina previously stole Mary's husband, the issue of the campground is actually secondary at this point. However, as might be expected, all of that is put aside when a scarecrow suddenly comes alive and begins killing everyone. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that I initially thought that this was going to be one of the few good films in this massive series due in large part to the nature in which the characters were developed. Likewise, having a scarecrow as the supernatural entity behind the killings certainly didn't hurt either. Where the film suffers, however, is the exact location of this supposed campground and its relationship to the actual house in Amityville. I say this because I don't recall any mention of a cornfield being situated in Amityville or, for that matter, any mention of the actual house there either. Instead, the audience is given an alternate story about a child molester who was killed by Mary and Tina's mother for the murder of their older sister. Or something like that. It's all kind of confusing. Throw in weak special effects and a complete lack of suspense and it all adds up to a rather weak horror film, which I have rated accordingly. Below average.

The amount of time it took me to think of that title pun is the same time it took the filmmakers to work on this movie.

An estranged family inherits their dead mothers campground (the land was a cornfield that never could grow corn *spoooooky*

One sister slept with the others husband long ago and now they hate each other. Much to one's dismay, they decide to try and fix the camp up and make a go of it. Unfortunately there happens to be two murderous scarecrows on the grounds.

Typical of most of today's low budget horror from the UK, Amityville Scarecrow looks nice. Lighting and cinematography are competent. The actors are mostly decent, with the only exception being the sister Mary - her shrill voice and angry attitude make you want the scarecrow to off her asap. Music and sound design are also pretty poor, I would be surprised if the music wasn't all free stock tracks, and the audio in several scenes has an extremely loud sound floor of wind, likely to mask that the audio was recorded with that same noise I would guess.

How about what we are here for: the horror content? The scarecrow costume is basically a higher end Halloween costume, but it looks decent. The kills however are uniformly awful. Most kills are offscreen and we get a body with a dribble of blood from its mouth.

If they had spent some money on even rudimentary special effects and provided some gore, Amityville Scarecrow could have been a passable slasher flick, instead, we get another in the ever growing long list of terrible Amityville flops.

Oh, and how does this relate to Amityville you ask? Well it seems that the High Hopes house was located on the land and torn down to build this campground. How Long Island has mysteriously transported to the English countryside is not mentioned.

Arriving at a remote summer camp, a family hoping to reconcile over the loss of their mother by taking over the camp for themselves are soon inundated by the belief that a killer scarecrow is responsible for a slew of disappearances in the area which is proved true forcing them to work together to stop it.

Overall, this was a pretty solid and fun genre effort. One of the biggest factors here is the strong setup that's featured throughout here that brings together several rather fun storylines for a rather fine starting point. Working well with the distanced sisters who are trying to repair their relationship after a slew of past trauma and issues between them that held up the reconciliation before getting them back together trying to sell the property, this is a fine way to set the first half in motion by creating a solid conflict between them that gets them together at the location to start their healing. This goes along nicely with the secondary setup of the sisters discovering the history of the location involving the haunted house that provided the series of strange accidents and deaths that follow it while they try to figure out how to help their parents get back together that shows how the two stories at play work together. That allows for a decent series of confrontations and encounters with the main scarecrow once it gets up and moving. With a fine opening sequence that involves the creature taking out the couple arriving at the campground, the later scenes are quite fun with the reanimation sequence featuring the creature coming to life after numerous amounts of ridicule before to deal out some rather fun stalking around the campground and surrounding locations. This goes along with the later encounters where the series of ambushes by the creature lead to a solid series of deaths and action here which never really rises above the decent but keeps everything at a frantic enough pace to provide simply decent kills and an intriguing look to the killer that are enough to hold this one up. There are some issues featured here which bring it down. The main factor to be had with this is the utterly sluggish and glacial pacing that spends way too much time on the various storylines rather than dealing out the scarecrow slashing. Going in-depth on the sisters' relationship and personal struggles with each other comes at the expense of the creature action which takes until the film's half-over before it even gets resurrected in the first place, and to then stop immediately after that point to learn the truth by way of a videotape confession about the incident may put the pieces together rather nicely but also causes the pacing to become so start/stop at the point where you don't want that is utterly criminal. This type of stupidity is odd to see from a setup like this, and tends to go along nicely here with the lower budget here without any kind of spectacular deaths or gore to be the main drawbacks here.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.

What can I say?

Geography may not be my best subject, but I thought Long Island was in the states, not across the pond.

The cover art was nice. The acting was meh.

I have seen better, scarier movies on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.

This was a bad, glorified Lifetime Network movie with all the back and forth drama between the characters. And this is not a dig on Lifetime, I have seen much better movies on that channel.

The only thing I liked the most about this movie is when the end credits rolled.