A cadre of military misfits pilfers 3.5 million dollars, hijacks a puddle jumper, and attempts to hightail it south of the border. But wouldn’t you know it, one of the gang decides he’d rather keep all the loot for himself and promptly parachutes into the dark night, landing in the vicinity of a ragged cornfield. Determined to take back their stolen cash, the team lands the plane, and descends upon the lonely farmland, machine guns at the ready.
Though I had heard many good things about this one, in particular the unnerving atmosphere and creepy scarecrow-zombies, I was a bit hesitant to give this a screening, due to its year of release (1988) and use of soldiers as protagonists. By and large, when soldiers are involved, machine guns are involved, and when machine guns are involved, horror movies are boring. The reason? People with machine guns are generally not afraid of anything. Even if they end up eviscerated and stuffed with greenbacks, they initially don’t believe that anything, particularly lifeless scarecrows, can do them any harm. This bravado is, in turn, transmitted to the audience, which can’t help but feel some sense of security in all that firepower. True to form, nearly every early scene in Scarecrows featuring gung-ho soldiers toting heavy weaponry is low on horror tension.
But then something unexpected happens: as our heroes realize that they’ll have to spend the night in a decrepit farmhouse, surrounded by eerie fields of corn, and creepy, lifelike scarecrows, they begin to lose their indestructible military veneer and start acting like proper horror protagonists. They fight among themselves as to the best plan of action. They rush madly into the cornfields in hopes of enacting an escape. In other words, they panic, and the last vestiges of rational existence are dispensed with. And we realize that in this forsaken and otherworldly place, ideas of law and order, right and wrong, don’t apply. Even the ostensibly stark boundary between the animate and the inanimate is blurred, as the human-shaped, hay-stuffed burlap husks slowly begin to march through their cornfield domain—with terrible purpose.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Fear.net ondemand
11 Oct 2008 3:48 PM | Submit Comment