A killer scarecrow is said to return every 20 years to attack the locals. RICHARD PHILLIPS-JONES looks at rural fear-fest Curse Of The Scarecrow.
TITLE: Curse Of The Scarecrow
RELEASED: October 2018
CAST: Kate Lister (June Sommers), Louisa Warren (Nancy Holders), Cassandra French (Karen Spencer)
WRITER: Shannon Holiday
DIRECTOR: Louisa Warren
Review of Curse of The Scarecrow 2018
As a youngster, June (Kate Lister) witnessed her parents being murdered by what appeared to be a scarecrow. Her psychiatrist, Karen (Cassandra French) suggests that June should return to her childhood home and confront her demons.
They are joined by June’s best friend, Nancy (played by director Louisa Warren), hurried along by the apparent suicide of June’s brother around the 20th anniversary of their parents’ deaths. Is the scarecrow on the prowl again?
A movie which appears to have been much more fun to make than it is to actually sit through, Curse Of The Scarecrow suffers agonising lapses in logic, and gross stupiditiy on the part of its characters which make the cast of a Friday The 13th movie look like MENSA candidates.
Confronted by the dreaded scarecrow, characters look away when distracted by the sound of a crow, leaving the killer rustic-mannequin to bump them off. Because, yeah, the sound of a crow in the countryside is such an unexpected novelty, isn’t it? Who’d expect to come across crows on a farm, of all places?
And why, in the name of all that is sacred, would someone suggest driving into town for help and leave their two companions behind, when they are all just a few feet away from the car and could simply do a runner together?
Dodgy accents, woefully underwritten characters, I could go on… And yet, for all that the film is by no means a good one, Curse Of The Scarecrow is all too easy a target, for it is simply one of many symptoms of a malaise in the horror film market.
It’s certainly no worse than a plethora of titles clogging up shelf space in your local emporium/supermarket. When there are distributors out there all too ready to release such fodder (I’m looking straight at you, High Fliers Films), one can hardly blame anyone for churning it out.
Having already unleashed the pretty-much-a-mockbuster Pet Graveyard and Mandy The Doll, plus the basically-the-same-story-as-this-one Bride Of Scarecrow (aka Scarecrow Rising) on an unsuspecting public, the same production team have Scarecrow Vs. Vikings in post-production. Is this the makings of a Brit-Scarecrow franchise?
As the late Edward Woodward might have said: Jesus Christ! No!
Have you seen Curse of the Scarecrow? Tell us about it in the comments section below!