Scarecrow (2013)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

A group of students on a detention 'break': all twenty-somethings, suitably attractive and perfectly manicured. A nice-guy teacher, probably late-twenty-something, casually perfect. They're travelling to a remote field, allegedly haunted, to dismantle the great scarecrow there and have it returned to the local town in time for a festival. Kristen (Lacey Chabert), whose parents own the land, turns up - stunning and immaculate also, her job is to fish uncertainly for compliments beneath dough-eyes, from teacher Aaron (Robert Dunne) who, it turns out, is her ex. Her current boyfriend also turns up. Guess what? He's a lovely looking lad as well. All characters are equipped with the usual put-downs and quick prom-wit and, as written and played, are as blandly perfect, or as perfectly bland, as can be. All set? Alright then, let the loud noises and 'weird happenings' instantly reduce them into shrieking quiverers.From this point, all previous patchy personalities, such as they are, are done away with and the group become as one: victims waiting to happen. Only ginger outcast Cal (Iain Belcher) retains his given nervous personality, which gets him a girl, if only for a short time. There are moments in between the crashes and panicking where some of the (alleged) teens get close to 'making out' with each other, but good grief - between the horror non-events and the scriptwriters' take on 'burgeoning relationships' and scratchy voiced profundity, this is a film that refuses to affect me in any way whatsoever.I shouldn't perhaps be so grumpy: this is not for me, but it does seem to be a genre. 'Teen-slasher' will rarely go out of fashion, because it has rarely been in fashion. It has long since existed though, on the peripheries, secondary to its memorable Freddies and Jasons, feeding the spaces and silences on a first date, and not meant to be concentrated upon too much. Some listings mistakenly have 'Scarecrow's running time at 197 minutes, which would be truly terrifying. At its true length of 87 minutes, it provides nothing much, doesn't really offend, and contains a fairly reasonable CGI scarecrow but not a lot in terms of actual shivers. The main man Aaron presents limited displays of shock and resourcefulness, making sure the pearly whites are on display.

With the Scarecrow Festival on the horizon, teacher Aaron Harris is giving out punishment for six students serving detention.Their task is to help Aaron's ex-girlfriend Kristen fix her family farm before it's sold. But the cornfields circling the farm come with a legend that never sleeps, never dies, can't be stopped, and hear their cries. When the students play a terrifying game of cat and mouse in the cornfield with what they think is a wild animal, Kristen tries to convince them that the Scarecrow is very real, and rejuvenated by the blood of its prey.......Apart from the not too bad CG of the titular creature, this is nothing more than a cheap knock off of Jeepers Creepers one and two.We have the obligatory biggish name actress in the form of 'megastar' Lacey Chabert, and the bloke who was in the straight to DVD sequels to Cruel Intentions, and The Skulls. We are talking high profile here...Add you stereotypical bunch of high school students, and you have a recipe for a film that sounds good on paper, but the finished product is just a waste of time for everyone involved.All of the cast try to do their best with the poor script, and the reasoning behind the shape shifting of the Scarecrow is never fully explained. So we get nothing more than silly kids running around into dark places, thinking they can kill something supernatural by stabbing and shooting it. Have they never seen a low budget horror film before?Of course they haven't, They are in a horror film, which is meta.And meta rhymes with better, which the writers must do next time...

School teacher Aaron Harris (Dunne) is in charge of detention, so he sentences his group of six high school students to clean up a friend's (Chabert) family farm which has a urban legend attached to it. A massacre at the farm years earlier has it haunted by an evil spirit which takes up residence in the field's scarecrow. Before you can pick an ear of corn this digital scarecrow is attacking our hapless group and killing them off in the farm and the adjoining cornfield. This Syfy movie starts off decently enough and then crumbles under lousy digital effects and a script that doesn't have much to offer. Rick Suvalle's script is light on character development so we don't really get to know any of them so when they're in danger we are disconnected as an audience. Even the back-story of the legend of the farm and the origin of the killer scarecrow are left without explanation. The production value is fine but the CGI scarecrow just doesn't supply any chills to speak of. A few practical effects and a decent amount of bloodshed help a little bit, but in the end it's a pretty lifeless entry into the killer Scarecrow sub-genre.

I can be rather short about reviewing this flick. It's not scary at all but still you keep watching it to know how it will end. The story itself you have seen a thousand times before and Jeepers Creepers (2001) isn't far away. What turns it a bit down is that the scarecrow always is done in CGI. It doesn't look that bad after all but sometimes it do looks cheap. Luckily the wounds it creates on it's victims do look gruesome. The flick starts in a gory way and from that point it continues without a lot of boring moments. But as I said, you have seen it all before and there are already a few flicks out concerning scarecrows. Let Husk (2011) be much better than this one but it's watchable. I guess youth will do have it's scary moments but again, the CGI do sometimes attracts you more than the story itself due a few continuity mistakes. Let be the car crash the most important one. At the end of the day its' a CGIcrow with some nasty wounds being involved.Gore 1/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2,5/5 Comedy 0/5