John’s Horror Corner: Scarecrows (1988), sort of a horror-action B-movie delight.

MY CALL: Much better than I thought, both in fun “bad horror-ness” and in terms of how well- made it was. Recommended for fans of 80s B-cinema. MORE MOVIES LIKE Scarecrows: I have come to discover there are a LOT of scarecrow horror movies out there, and I’ve only seen this one. So I’ll blindly suggest Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981).

If you’re looking for some fun nonsense, this is immediately great. Bunch of tough guys with mean sneers and tactical gear, smoking cigars and shooting guns miles above ground in an airplane. Feels like the opening of a bad action movie, and I like it! After a heist, a plane hijacking, a double-cross and an in-flight gunfight, one of them parachute-escapes with the money down into a rural cemetery populated with creepy scarecrows. Now Bert the double-crosser needs to find where the money fell before his criminal colleagues catch up to him.

After locating the trunk of cash, Bert notices that some of the scarecrow crosses no longer have scarecrows on them. Hmmmm. If you’ve seen many horror movies, you know this doesn’t bode well for Bert.

This movie is actually pretty well made… I was expecting something hokier and cheesier. The gore gags are pretty good, visceral and graphic. Victims are hung like scarecrows and gutted like turkeys, with Bert getting stuffed with the stolen cash and then sewn back up, only to become some sort of scarecrow zombie himself. Bloody limb-sawing and gushy face stabbings ensue as the scarecrows pick off the criminal team one by one. Panic sets in and wild hypotheses form. Are these scarecrows zombies? Were they supposed to land here after the heist? Are Corbin and his team dead and being punished in Hell?

At first, I was disappointed that the scarecrows kill primarily by stabbing. But their stab game is strong; brutal and graphic. If you get killed by a scarecrow, you become a scarecrow. Simple.

Writer and director William Wesley (Route 666) stitched together a pretty solid cult classic B-movie. I thought this would be a fun, awful B-movie. But this was a pretty solidly good B-movie, if you ask me.