Scarecrows
Scarecrows (1988)
I’ve bounced a couple of times off Scarecrows but after falling asleep midway through another watch, finally managed to get through it the next time and … it’s sort of okay? Not amazing.
There’s a whole load of fun ideas in here like the scarecrows stuffing and possessing the bodies of the dead and … okay, there’s one fun idea here but that’s one more than plenty of other films I sit down to so that’s more than fine. It’s kinda scattershot and unfocused though, sometimes it’s not sure if it wants to be an exciting VHS action movie, a hefty dollop of Predator but with scarecrows and stabbing, a zombie film, a slasher or any number of other things.
I won’t say it’s to the film’s detriment so much as I found it made everything a bit more difficult for me to watch with my already adhd addled brain.
I’d have probably been happier with just the sort of base under siege story that it somewhat leans into towards the end (I am a Rob of simple tastes, after all) or it concentrating on any one of the threads and less of the rest of it. But! That’s not the film it’s trying to be! It is all these things and it was around three quarters of the way through I realised why I was finding it a more difficult watch than perhaps I should. And yes, it is totally unfair on the film.
Nobody could have known or seen this coming in 1988 - obviously - but in 2025, what Scarecrows reminds me of more than just about anything else is a videogame. It’s got the guns, it’s got the awful dialogue, it’s got the incoherence because it’s really just about moving to the next thing and not in the Poltergeist haunted house kind of way that I adore, more in terms of a corridor shooter shuffling you from one encounter to the next. Were I watching this in 1988 or whatever year it released on home video here, I’d have probably had a ball with its pure silliness and non stop nonsense (alas, the cover and the idea of a killer scarecrow put the shits up me, so I did not) but in 2025, it’s cursed by what people have made since. And more to the point, cursed by my own exhaustion with a specific vibe.
It’s ultimately a me problem, not the film, yeah? Perhaps it’s just one I need to put to one side for a few years until the memory of post millennial videogames has faded somewhat further and then I can enjoy it again. That doesn’t seem like too far fetched a scenario! There is a lot in here normally I would go for and I’d kinda like to be able to meet the film on its own terms more and lean into and embrace its big silly. Hopefully, that is a future that’s not too far away. I doubt it’s a film I’ll ever learn to love but I reckon we could be friends, you know?