Scarecrow

Since the movie business is running out of places to put 'Die Hard', or terrorist in small, confined spaces, the new question filmmakers are asking themselves is 'Where can we put the Breakfast Club?' Putting loosely disguised characters from 'The Breakfast Club' in horror movies is kind of genius when you think about it, since most of the characters from that movie were intensely annoying, and we wanted to see them die anyway. Or at least I did. I think this is like the sixth or seventh horror movie I've seen where they've put 'The Breakfast Club' and this time it's a SyFy original called 'Scarecrow'. Is it awful? Not really. Is it any good? Not really.

slaughtered as the scarecrow is out and about and causing a ruckus. What is this scarecrow? How did it come to be? Why is it doing what it is doing? Why are we even asking these silly questions? All we know is that the scarecrow thingie, which is more a bunch of animated twigs than an actual scarecrow, came back to life via randy teenagers trying to have sex in the beginning of this movie, and that it hates the Miller family. That would be Kristen. For this little bit of information we can thank farmer Murphy, as played by the legendary Jerry Wasserman who will spend his brief time in this movie as Exposition Guy.

Our heroes are in a heap of dookey right now, as the twig monster is unstoppable, and hell bent on murder, picking off these annoying people one at a time in some interesting ways. For no reason in particular. And we don't know why. Not that I guess one is really looking for motivation when being chased by a hungry twig monster. All looks lost. Even after we win, I'm still thinking we lost. Society as we know it will soon end as the twig monster kills us all one by one. The good thing is that it's gonna take a while before he gets to your town.

'Scarecrow' is a fine example of why we lament the dismissal of the Sci-Fi channel in favor of this thing they call SyFy. SyFy attempts to give us more mainstream, borderline competent horror fare such as this one as opposed to magical Frankenfishes or Mansquitos or Pteradactyl's that we so enjoyed back in the day. One would assume that borderline competence would win over outright incompetence any day of the week, though in defense of Frankenfish and Mansquito, those were actually pretty good movies, but when it comes to these kinds of movies, borderline competence usually results in run-of-the-mill. And that's something we can get anywhere. No fun in run of the mill, and that's what 'Scarecrow' pretty much adds up to being.

Despite the run of the mill nature of Scarecrow, however, there were some thing we liked about it. For instance we enjoyed watching Lacey Chabert run, even though she seems built more for comfort than speed. We liked the character of Beth (Brittney Wilson) who was one of the more entertaining 'We All Gonna Die' characters we've seen in one of these types of movies. I liked the fact that characters kept sacrificing themselves to kill a monster that can't be killed. Now in deference to them, since it's made of twigs, logically fire should kill it. Oh well. And I did kind of like the CGI monster. I mean it was no scarecrow, and I do think 'Twig Beast' would've been a better title, but it looked okay to me.

What I didn't like was that it had no magic. Sheldon Wilson has a made a number of these types of movies, almost all of which I've seen, and most of his movies have been competent, but unremarkable. 'Scarecrow' keeps itself moving in the right direction for the most part, but when it's over, it's over. Not a lot of laughs, not much to talk about, just a normal movie featuring annoying people with bad cell phone service getting slaughtered by a twig monster. We've kind of seen that before. Not the twig monster part. That, at least was something we could grab ahold too. The Twig Monster just needs to be in a better… or worse movie… to get the most of what he can offer.