As made for TV movies go, 1981s Dark Night of the Scarecrow
is as good as it gets. Previously available only on a long OOP VHS,
VCI recently released a stunning looking DVD of this horror/revenge
minor classic.
Starring the venerable Charles Durning
and Larry Drake (Darkman, L.A. Law, Dr. Giggles), Dark Night of the
Scarecrow is a slow burn, quiet creeper, less gratuitousness and more
skin-crawling tingles.
Bubba (Drake) is the village
idiot, and after a girl is attacked, postmaster Otis (Durning) and his
cronies make a rash decision to take vigilante justice on the presumed
guilty Bubba, and after a tense hunt, they find Bubba hiding in the
fields as a scarecrow. Helpless on the cross, Bubba is gunned down in
cold blood by the rage-blinded men. Soon after, they discover that
Bubba had actually saved the girl's life, and their decision to take a
man's life was in vain. However, because of a grudge held toward Bubba,
this action doesn't seem to weigh too heavily on any of the men's
souls...until they start getting picked off by an unseen force, one by
one.
The cast is better than it has any right to be,
but Durning is especially sterling as his usual mealy-mouthed, greasy,
conniving self. Drake is wonderfully sympathetic in a sort of
Frankenstein's monster role.
The pacing of the film is
terrific, and the sense of vindication in the viewer grows alongside the
fear felt by the perpetrators of the heinous crime. There aren't any
"cheap scares", and every fear that the antagonists hold is played out
in agonizingly long detail. The last five minutes are truly something
to behold, filled with a creeping dread that is so regrettably absent
from most modern "horror". With thumbs up from Vincent Price, Ray
Bradbury, Stuart Gordon, and me, Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a much
appreciated resurrected gem that can be appreciated by the
dyed-in-the-wool genre fan as well as the casual viewer. Watch it.
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