There are two types of scarecrow movies; those that aren't half bad and those that are downright silly and Night of the Scarecrow falls into the latter category.
Movie gets going with the town mayor holding a speech complete with college brass band for the grand opening of a new mall as an indication that the alleged sleepy one horse farming town is actually thriving. While this is going on there's an argument ensuing between 2 guys and it ends up with one happening to fire the other one for his irresponsible ways.
That night the recently fired young man does what every country rube appears to do in these situations; get drunk, break into a shed, steal a tractor and drive dangerously through a corn field. In doing so they happen to drive over a large stone slab implanted in the ground with a cross carved into the surface.
Once that is done, an evil presence emerges and transfers into a nearby scarecrow, refilling it with fresh straw. The scarecrow then sets about killing people.
It's not until you're halfway into the movie that a recently attacked priest tells the story of the town founders 100 years prior and a deal they made with a warlock. The townspeople were starving, the ground was unfit for growing, so they made this pact to enable bumper crops and good times. In return the warlock seduced the towns women forcing them to engage in debauchery; including the daughter of the town leader. Using the warlocks spell book against him, they crucified him, waited for him to die then burnt his body and buried it in the cornfield. The bones had a spell cast and the stone slab placed over as a seal. Normally after you'd hear a story like this you'd be thinking the person is drunk or spaced out and in need of a lot of therapy, but not our 2 hapless heroes, this rambling fantastical story just spurs them into action of tracking down a killer scarecrow.
Now the scarecrow, possessed by the warlock spirit, is going around getting revenge on the descendants of the town founders and hunting down his book so he can be a real live boy again. The race is on to find the old guys bones and dispose of them once and for all.
The story of age old revenge and great great grandsons/daughters having to pay the price for old misdeeds has been done to death in a thousand other horror movies and it's been done much better than in this outing. The idea of killing the very people who have the information on the whereabouts of whatever the demon/ghost/spirit/scarecrow etc happens to be looking for always seemed counterproductive to me but seeing as I'm not any of those things yet, what do I know? I do know that as far as scarecrow movies go, this is far from being great and there's no real reason to go out of your way to hunt this down. It's worth a look on late night TV or a "let's make fun of stupid horror movies" marathon.
Movie gets going with the town mayor holding a speech complete with college brass band for the grand opening of a new mall as an indication that the alleged sleepy one horse farming town is actually thriving. While this is going on there's an argument ensuing between 2 guys and it ends up with one happening to fire the other one for his irresponsible ways.
That night the recently fired young man does what every country rube appears to do in these situations; get drunk, break into a shed, steal a tractor and drive dangerously through a corn field. In doing so they happen to drive over a large stone slab implanted in the ground with a cross carved into the surface.
Once that is done, an evil presence emerges and transfers into a nearby scarecrow, refilling it with fresh straw. The scarecrow then sets about killing people.
It's not until you're halfway into the movie that a recently attacked priest tells the story of the town founders 100 years prior and a deal they made with a warlock. The townspeople were starving, the ground was unfit for growing, so they made this pact to enable bumper crops and good times. In return the warlock seduced the towns women forcing them to engage in debauchery; including the daughter of the town leader. Using the warlocks spell book against him, they crucified him, waited for him to die then burnt his body and buried it in the cornfield. The bones had a spell cast and the stone slab placed over as a seal. Normally after you'd hear a story like this you'd be thinking the person is drunk or spaced out and in need of a lot of therapy, but not our 2 hapless heroes, this rambling fantastical story just spurs them into action of tracking down a killer scarecrow.
Now the scarecrow, possessed by the warlock spirit, is going around getting revenge on the descendants of the town founders and hunting down his book so he can be a real live boy again. The race is on to find the old guys bones and dispose of them once and for all.
The story of age old revenge and great great grandsons/daughters having to pay the price for old misdeeds has been done to death in a thousand other horror movies and it's been done much better than in this outing. The idea of killing the very people who have the information on the whereabouts of whatever the demon/ghost/spirit/scarecrow etc happens to be looking for always seemed counterproductive to me but seeing as I'm not any of those things yet, what do I know? I do know that as far as scarecrow movies go, this is far from being great and there's no real reason to go out of your way to hunt this down. It's worth a look on late night TV or a "let's make fun of stupid horror movies" marathon.