Review of Messengers 2: The Scarecrow (2009) by Robert B — 07 Aug 2011

The Messengers 2: The Scarecrow (Martin Barnewitz, 2009).

By far the best thing about The Messengers 2: The Scarecrow is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the Pang Brothers film to which it is supposedly a sequel. Danish director Barnewitz, a Ghost House veteran (Room 205), and writer Todd Farmer, who wrote the original (how much input did he have here? Hard to tell), turn in something far less than we got with the first film.

The setup is similar: John Rollins (The Boondock Saints' Norman Reedus) is a down-on-his-luck farmer who's about to lose his farm. To add insult to injury, the guy from the bank who's supposed to take it from him (The Grudge 3's Michael McCoy) is both an old friend of Rollins' and an old boyfriend of his wife Mary's (Lost Highway's Heather Stephens). One day, while poking around in the barn, John finds a false wall, and when he breaks it open, he discovers an old scarecrow. He takes it out to put it up, but his son Michael (X-Men: First Class' Laurence Belcher) thinks it's evil and begs his father to burn it. On the other hand, Jude Weatherby (Office Space's Richard Riehle) and Jude's seductive wife Miranda (Bruce Almighty's Darcy Flowers) offer more level-headed advice: it's a scarecrow, what harm can it do to put it up? So John does, earning his son's mistrust, and the next morning, John walks out of the house and discovers every crow in the area is dead...

You know where this is going, and that is the movie's greatest failure; at no point does this movie ever attempt to surprise you. As soon as Jude shows up you know who he is. And the fact that a sixty-year-old farmer who looks like Richard Riehle is married to a twentysomething housewife who looks like Darcy Flowers pretty much telegraphs what her role is going to be in all this. The second Mary brings up John's previous drinking habit, you know he's going to fall off the wagon. Etc., etc. There are no surprises at all here.

This is even more distressing when IMDB trivia reports the whole Todd Farmer confusion: according to IMDB, this was actually supposed to be the script for the first one, but it was so extensively rewritten by Mark Wheaton that Farmer, for the first movie, was just credited with âoriginal storyâ?. He should have left well enough alone; Wheaton's finished product was far superior to this. *.