Scarecrows, much like zombies, seem to be a never-ending well for people to create horror movies from. This is one let’s say is not outstanding in its field.
Cary and his sister Tia are riding along with their step-dad, Don, on a long car trip “out west”. They pass field after field of corn and crops and not much else. Cary tries to make light of the situation, making jokes and trying to keep his sister and step-dad in a good mood during their trip. Suddenly the car gets a flat and Don discovers that the spare tire is no good either. He is going to make the long walk to the next town over to get someone to come to tow the car and get them back on their way. He instructs Cary and Tia to stay put and he should be back shortly. Naturally, they get bored a couple hours after he leaves and decide to search on their own. They find a seemingly abandoned house. No response to knocking on the door. That is until a stranger informs them they are trespassing. Simon is a little creepy but invites them in for a drink. After a bit and the sun starts to go down, and Simon invites them out to a party in the cornfields.
Simon seems to be slightly reluctant to go to the party and when they arrive, it becomes obvious, it’s because the other kids in town pick on him and call him names. Undeterred by the others, Simon, Cary, and Tia all try to have a good time. That is until they go out into the middle of a field and get chased by the police, and one of the party-goers ends up getting dragged away while Cary and Tia both end up so drunk they can’t remember how they even got home. From then on everyone is suspicious of everyone else, and things only get worse from there.
So… this movie kinda sucks. It has a decent idea that it is trying to put in place but it manages to squander just about all inroads to it being interesting. Simon and the cop one second are fighting the next second they are good buddies. But … to what end? The crazy people are carving up teens in the middle of nowhere and keep saying they have to leave “before the morning” but they never explain why. Simon is apparently allergic to the sun but he is always awake, day or night. It’s like Children of the Corn meets House of Wax but not as good as either of them.
The acting is okay. It has that going for it. It’s mostly shot at night so it’s hard to say really if any of the set pieces were good or not. What this movie suffers from the most is pacing issues. It starts slow, which is fine, but just when it starts to get interesting there is the bulk of the movie taking place in a farmhouse party for the adults that drags on FOREVER. I guess it was trying to build up the suspense and the tension but it was so boring waiting for what I knew would happen to actually happen. Also, the acronym in the title (C.O.R.N) is never mentioned, unless I missed it, and it apparently stands for “Collective Order of Recreational Necrophilanthropists”. What does “necrophilanthropists” even mean? The cherry on top is I am pretty sure that the writers threw in a Mad Magazine Alfred E. Newman joke for literally no reason. Not even joking about the “MAD” line in this flick. So the dialog goes like this:
[Girl 1] I’ll be back for you. Don’t worry. [Girl 1 pauses half a beat]… What? [Girl 2] Me worry?
I had to rewind it three different times just to make sure I was hearing everything correctly. Sadly, I was. The ending is lame and has an unneeded “stinger” at the very end. Only once during this whole thing did I actually get a true horror movie vibe and that was when there was an extreme close-up of some pretty gnarly stuff close to the end. Plainly put, this movie isn’t worth seeing.
Comments