By Geno McGahee
I love scarecrow movies. SCARECROWS, DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROWS, SCARECROW GONE WILD, DARK HARVEST, and the underrated RISE OF THE SCARECROWS are just so much fun to watch. Scarecrows are fun characters to watch and they are naturally creepy. In JEEPERS CREEPERS, when the Creeper is pretending to be a scarecrow, it’s one of the best scenes of the film. There is something awful special about them…and something awful about PSYCHO SCARECROW, a 2000 micro budget flick from Canada.
I’m glad that we have a “psycho” scarecrow because it gives me hope that there will be sane scarecrows that don’t chop people up with axes. In this instance, we have a psycho one that carries an axe and this one is not your sack head scarecrow…he has a pumpkin head. I much prefer the sack. Look at me, I’m sounding just like my uncle.
The accidental death of a friend leads the group to hang him up as a scarecrow, for some reason, and now he’s back with an axe to grind. The movie begins rather slowly, but the scarecrow does bring a level of fun to the show and watching him walk around with a lot of anger and holding an axe makes this movie compelling stuff. It may not be the quality of a SCARECROW GONE WILD (my God, did I just say that), but it’s got a charm to it.
We also have character with a terrible mullet. This couldn’t have been shot in 2000. The idea of a man having a mullet that horrible in 2000 defies logic. People knew by then that the hairstyle of that sort had to go. Maybe that’s why the scarecrow went psycho. He’s sick of people not obeying good fashion.
I do like how the scarecrow sort of floats when he runs. I don’t think that he knew exactly how to run to be scary and he sort of ran overly slow like he was an astronaut. You see that a lot in horror films…the killer is too quick and they have to slow up in order to stay behind the potential victims without catching up. This psycho scarecrow could really haul ass if he wanted to.
There are certain elements to this movie that are pretty decent. I liked the scenes where the friends were together singing by the campfire, dealing with the scarecrow and so on, but the detectives took away from the story. Right when you get into it, the detectives begin discussing the case and fighting. The money is the scarecrow and the potential victims…not two young detectives fighting over where the truth may lie.
Another thing that I didn’t particularly like was the narration. I know that this scarecrow story is based off an audio tape that the detectives found but it could have transitioned into the story and got totally away from the girl telling us what is going on every two minutes.
PSYCHO SCARECROW is a micro budget flick that doesn’t rank above many other scarecrow horror movies, but is still a must see for any scarecrow fan. I recommend it as a scarecrow fan. Are you a scarecrow fan? If yes, watch it. If no, go fuck yourself.
Rating: 4/10
