Review of Scarecrows (1988) by Camden N — 17 Apr 2009

Wow. I haven't seen a movie as ambitiously bad as this one in a long time, and coming from me, that's saying a lot. How bad is "Scarecrows"? Well, let's take a look.

There's some of the worst "day for night" footage I've seen this side of an Ed Wood film for starters. It's so pathetically done that characters will be running through a field in the dark, and the camera will cut to what they're looking at, and suddenly it's the middle of the afternoon. Then there's the fact that a good 80% of the dialog is for all intents and purposes, phoned in. Literally. You'll hear voices of characters who aren't onscreen, or who have their backs turned, or--in the most ridiculous example--onscreen, facing the camera, yet not moving their lips at all. It was so constant with one character that I thought they decided to go with the "inner monologue" route, to avoid having to pay him extra for actually talking on camera, until he finally moved his lips about half an hour in. Then there's the dialog itself, which is bad to the point of being painful for a couple of reasons: first because of how poorly it's written, and second because it never stops. There's always -someone- chattering away about something, except for a handful of scenes that are blissfully devoid of lines like "I think this place is full of demonic demons.".

Apart from that, the scripting is wildly inconsistent, with characters talking about things they haven't seen, people and objects seemingly teleporting around, and character relationships changing at the drop of a hat. There's also a hand grenade that doesn't explode for nearly 30 seconds after the pin gets pulled, a guy obsessing over his harmonica, a character HEARING SOUNDS through a night vision scope...do I really need to go on? The sad part is, "Scarecrows" isn't really even worth it for the cheese factor. There are some spots where the jokes come easily, but a lot of the movie is just slow, ponderous, and painful.