Night of the Scarecrow Blu-ray Review
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, May 3, 2013
Thomas Tryon was an actor of some note in the fifties and sixties who is probably best remembered for his starring
roles in
The Cardinal and
The Longest Day. Tryon really seemed to hit his stride, though, as an author,
penning the huge 1971 bestseller
The Other, which was turned into a haunting 1972 film by Robert Mulligan (a
film that would look—courtesy of its beautiful cinematography by Robert L. Surtees—and sound—courtesy of its
gorgeous Jerry Goldsmith score—fantastic on Blu-ray). Tryon followed up
The Other a couple of years later with
a somewhat lesser remembered but just as chilling novel called
Harvest Home, which played almost like a first
person retelling of Shirley Jackson's immortal
The Lottery, only with certain other atavistic elements added. One
of the chief ideas running throughout
Harvest Home (which was made into a pretty lamentable television movie
starring Bette Davis) was that of a seemingly idyllic little country village that was harboring a rather disturbing secret,
one that ultimately involves death and destruction. The denizens of Harvest Home would nonetheless have next to
nothing on the townspeople of Hanford (what is it with these places starting with "H"?) at the center of
Night of the
Scarecrow, for if the residents of Harvest Home were reliving a pagan past, the folks in Hanford were in a way
trying to
bury their past, and none too successfully at that. Perhaps at least a little humorously,
Night of the
Scarecrow is actually only one of
several "evil scarecrow" movies or made for television outings that have
been released over the years, and in fact one of the others bears the very similar title
Dark Night of the Scarecrow. Both of these
somewhat similar
Nights offer some excellent thrills and chills and both have a certain Southern Gothic element
(even if it's Southern
California in this film)
that plays rather well into a possessed killer scarecrow wreaking vengeance on various less than savory characters.
There's another (no doubt coincidental) relation to Thomas Tryon in
Night of the Scarecrow, in this case the film
version of
The Other. In the film, one of the young twins at the center of the story is being taught by his
mystical
Grandmother, kind of like the future King Arthur at the hands of Merlin, how to mentally inhabit creatures in the natural
world. The young boy starts to see things from a bird's point of view and Surtees' camera soars through sylvan fields
as
Goldsmith's sumptuous music swells. Rather strangely, there's something quite similar during
Night of the
Scarecrow's credits sequence, though in this case it's evidently a
crow's point of view and the music is
rather
reminiscent of John Williams' iconic half step motif that made
Jaws so memorable. The crow finally lands on a decrepit scarecrow in the middle of a corn field
and rather
rudely
plucks one of the button eyes off of the sad sack of straw. Immediately, the crow falls dead. It's an unsettling turn of
events, and it actually doesn't even make sense within the confines of the film's rather tenuous grasp on logic, but it
gets
things off to a rousing start.
We're then introduced to the bucolic little town of Hanford, California. (There actually
is a Hanford, California,
where the location work on this film was done, and one has to wonder what the civic fathers of that burg might have
been thinking when they allowed their pretty little village to be portrayed as such a den in iniquity. They may have
thought—kind of like the characters in the film—that they had made a deal with the devil.) The mayor, William Goodman
(Gary Lockwood,
2001: A Space
Odyssey) is helping the town celebrate a big new building project. A pretty young woman named Claire
(Elizabeth Barondes) pulls up in her bright red MG and begins listening, immediately attracting the attention of a young
man named Dillon (John Mese). Dillon of course puts the moves on Claire, trying to impress her by telling her he works
for the Mayor as a construction foreman and that he thinks the Mayor is a big gasbag. Guess what? Claire is the
Mayor's daughter.
Oops.
Luckily, Claire is the
estranged daughter of the Mayor, one who has been away from Hanford for years and
whose return is not immediately met with approval by the blowhard Mayor. To spite her father, she invites Dillon to
dinner, where he meets a weird assortment of other Goodman kin, including the town Sheriff, Frank Goodman (Stephen
Root), the town Priest, Thaddeus Goodman (Bruce Glover), and the Goodman who manages the vast (and very fertile)
Goodman farming concern, George (Dirk Blocker). Meanwhile, a punk named Danny Thompson (John Hawkes,
Winter's Bone,
The Sessions), whom we've already
seen fighting with Dillon at the town pride celebration, is wreaking havoc with some of Dillon's construction equipment.
With a buddy of his, Danny drunkenly takes a grader on a mad rampage through a cornfield, ultimately striking
something that sounds
very hard, which cracks open.
Cue spooky music.
Things begin heating up between Claire and Dillon while a number of gruesomely disturbing things start happening to
various other members of the Goodman family. Without spoiling too much of the gory fun that's in store, there are of
course murders galore (including one that's quite similar to one in
Dark Night of the Scarecrow), as well as some
pretty frightening maimings, all at the hands of a possessed scarecrow who has a particular obsession with something
he (it?) thinks is in the possession of the Goodman family.
Who is possessing the scarecrow turns out to be a
secret that several older members of the Goodman family had been hoping to
keep secret, and it plays into why
their lands have always been so incredibly lush.
Night of the Scarecrow has some real chills in it and it features some rather good special effects work. Again,
without spoiling anything, there are some spectacularly graphic effects that include all manner of mayhem, including a
patently phallic finger like device that the Scarecrow attempts to force into the mouths of various young women, to
disastrous consequences. The film works up a considerable head of steam until it gets just a little too silly in the final
showdown (which of course involves Dillon, Claire and the evil Scarecrow). Director Jeff Burr stages things very
effectively and gets some good performances out of a game cast.
