NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW - 'Dark Night Of The Scarecrow' aside, I always end up feeling a little let down by scarecrows in horror movies. Maybe I'm expecting a bit too much of them, but for me they seem to struggle to live up to their full macabre potential. 'Night Of The Scarecrow' attempts to redress the balance a smidge by having its crow-scaring bad guy perform acts that require a special effects team, and so, although it plays out roughly like a slasher complete with an array of Freddie-like references and mannerisms, it also brings in stuff like satanic scarecrow ears of corn that transform into thrashing, body-ripping tendrils a la the 'The Thing'. It's a thoroughly silly, only semi-coherent movie that had me entertained with its preference for wacky set-pieces over narrative virtue, although anyone actually looking for an explanation will eventually be treated to a mid-film info-dump concerning a small town's sorcerous past. Characters drop in and stick around enough to either do something weird (that sleazy priest and his oddball family) or die, and again, I can only say I approve. There's a certain look to US horror films of the mid nineties that I struggle to describe, a stylisation that somehow combines flatness with garishness. Anyway, it has that, as well as the lightweight quality shared by much of nineties horror. It's by the late Jeff Burr, who did 'The Stepfather 2' and many others.
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