We had a couple of warnings that Scarecrow County (2019) wasn’t going to be a great film when we came across it on Amazon Prime. Firstly, there was no trailer, which is never a good sign. Secondly, it… you know, started.
We should have heeded those warnings.
(There will be spoilers after this point so if you don't want
to know, turn back now.)
Wow. Just… wow.
The teaser sequence earned a great big sigh and eyeroll,
plus a few snorts of semi-amused derision from me for being so overdone.
You can tell straight away that Scarecrow County is going to be a
low-budget film with bad acting just from the opening four minutes. It starts
with a couple in a candlelit room, sitting in front of a Ouija board talking about how
the woman wouldn’t have to take “crappy care jobs” if she hadn’t gotten caught
stealing pills – which she defends by insisting that all nurses steal
pills.
Straight away my back is up because hello! Disrespect
for two of the most important jobs in the world?! I'm already thinking ‘Fuck
this movie’ and we haven't even gotten started.
The Ouija board is cool, at least, all battered and scarred. Too bad it plays exactly zero part in the movie. Literally has nothing
to do with any other part of the film. The whole teaser sequence is just a
giant waste of time.
Except we now know that the director thinks the definition
of white trash is someone who hates the Amish, works in the care industry, got high in
middle school, buys each guns for anniversaries, wears matching
plaid, is a fan of Peyton Manning, and apparently leave piles of newspapers
sitting in corners, waiting to catch on fire.
(Well, he might be onto something with the whole matching plaid
thing…)
I hated the opening, but the title sequence was
actually quite well done. The dancing flames with the firefighters silhouetted
by the burning building were very effective. Great imagery.
Overall, the acting in Scarecrow County is painfully overdone, which isn't helped by the fact that the
dialogue is so stiff they might as well be reading it directly off cue cards.
Winnie’s sister Zoe (Rachael Redolfi) is… is… Fuck if I know. It took until the end of the movie
to realize there was a reason she kept talking to her cartoons. I spent
most of it thinking she was just bat-shit crazy, not making a psychic
connection to their dead mother. So… well done with that.
Early on, a woman donates a pile of her deceased brother’s old books to
the library. Winnie finds a thirty-year-old composition book tucked away
inside that’s full of his tortured writing. Except that it doesn’t look thirty years old.
I have a ten-year-old composition book sitting on the shelf next to me and that
looks older.
That’s one of the main problems with this movie. Nothing looks
right. The homeless guy’s clothes look brand new. The town big shot's office looks like it was hobbled together with whatever was left from the local thrift shop. The
technology is outdated for a movie that was supposedly made in 2019. I mean…
they’re using flip phones and landlines.
And don't even ask me WTF is up with Winnie and Zoe's father, Brownie's (Tom Cherry,) fashion sense.
Anyway… Winnie takes the book to her dad, who used to know Joey (Connor Sherlock,) who was the journal's owner (after an interlude where Zoe's badly-wigged agent tries to convince her to go big while she petulantly insists
on doing exactly what she’s doing.) He promises to get it to the kid’s family
in the morning so you know he’s going to burn it the first chance he gets –
which is exactly what he does.
A cute little scarecrow hangs in the background, waiting to
be imbued with the spirit of poor bullied Joey.
And… yeah, the scarecrow never really gets any scarier than that. If you’re
going to make a killer scarecrow movie, you have to have a scary
scarecrow!
The next sequence is quite good because the father’s guilt
over the journal starts a phone tree where the old school friends check in on
each other but really what’s happening is that they’re showing you all the
fuckers about to die. It’s nice to have a checklist. Lol.
The rest of the movie is basically just the poor Joey getting his revenge as a scarecrow (or so you think... I'll come back to that) and people gabbing at each other on
telephones that must confuse the hell out of Gen Zers. That, and the crazy sister talking alternately to herself, to her
cartoon, and to her agent – while I wonder why the fuck she’s in the movie.
It does eventually explain the whole cartoon thing,
but the payoff is not worth how annoying she is in the meantime. There were times I was rooting for the scarecrow just to shut her
the fuck up.
There are also some pissing contests between the old school
friends and the return of some prodigal son, who seemed to serve no purpose but as a time
filler when nothing else was happening, but they hardly seem important enough
to mention. There were a few other small things that I found annoying (yeah, I know,
right?) like the overuse of the whole misty blue light effect. Every horror
movie seems to find a way to utilise it at some point. Scarecrow County uses it a few times but never well.
Throw in a scene where the scarecrow literally stands there
obediently in the background while they all have a heart-to-heart, a long
ramble from the father about John Denver, and an explanation that doesn’t
explain anything (So… wait. They were all the scarecrow? And the knife
was hay, but the hay was a journal?) and all you’ve got is a waste of
everyone’s time.
Rating: ⭐
Bechdel Test: 👍
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