Scarecrow backdrop
Scarecrow poster

SCARECROW

2002 • US HMDB
December 30, 2002

A high school outcast who lives in a trailer with his mother finally meets a friend. He wants to ask her if they can go the next step, but then sees her kissing another boy at a party. He runs home only to find his mother having sex with a drunk. He starts yelling, but is countered by the drunk when he suffocates him and makes him look like he hung himself. The scarecrow comes in when the boy's soul is pushed into it. He goes out for revenge.

Cast

Todd Rex, Tim Young, Tiffany Shepis, Roxanna Bina, Jen Richey, John Moore, Richard Elfman, Jason Simon, Mark Irvingsen, Belinda Gavin
Horror Commedia

REVIEWS (1)

RG

Roberto Giacomelli

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Lester is a young misfit: ridiculed by his schoolmates, beaten by bullies, and shunned by girls; his only pastime is staying locked in his room drawing. One night, Lester finds the courage to react against one of his mother's occasional lovers, but he is attacked and killed by the man. The murder is made to look like a suicide and the case is quickly closed, but the restless spirit of Lester reincarnates into a scarecrow. This is the opportunity for him to avenge all the wrongs suffered. The scarecrow, an ancient totem representing the most primitive fears, the primordial terrors that haunt man, the symbol of the fears that are inside and outside of us. A monstrous and unsettling straw dummy that watches us with an empty gaze from its strategic position and with all its ambiguous superiority. A fascinating figure, therefore, that lends itself very well to the cinematic horror imagination but has been little exploited; until it becomes the absolute protagonist of this 2002 film: an unparalleled boorishness that burns in a sea of idiocies a fascinating plot and an unsettling boogeyman. "Scarecrow" turns out to be a slasher movie that is all over the place, which stages a series of finds of an involuntary ridiculous clamor: it starts with a rickety screenplay that initially proceeds in the most classic way (showing the viewer the miserable life the protagonist leads) to crumple from the moment the monster enters the scene with a series of characters that appear and disappear without any logic and intrusive sequences that have little to do with the story narrated in the film, probably added only to lengthen the film by a few minutes. The characters are totally wrong: the loser protagonist can be credible, but then a series of supporting characters so superficial that it is hard to remember them immediately after watching the film. Surely, however, the true clamorous flaw of the film is the figure of the scarecrow which, although realized with an attractive aesthetic and all quite successful, is totally to be laughed at for the characterization of character. First of all, it is endowed with speech and as soon as it opens its mouth it utters ridiculous little jokes that make the skin crawl for how out of place they seem. Second clamorous mistake, which pushes the viewer to play piattello with the film's DVD, is the idea of making the scarecrow behave like a ninja: somersaults, backflips, flying kicks and ground shots; in short, they make this boogeyman do everything that a boogeyman in a horror movie should never do not to be heavily insulted by the viewer who watches astonished at his actions. The direction of Emmanul Itier is miserable and very television-like, and the cast is made up of a group of miserable unknowns of questionable talent; here and there some gore scenes can be glimpsed, but too few to satisfy the viewer. Curiously, in the end credits it is written that the film is dedicated to Dario Argento and a string of other great names of world horror cinema (the names of Carpenter, Romero, Craven, Hooper, Yuzna, Gordon can be seen), a dedication that leaves even more astonished thinking of the great names that the small Itier was aiming for.