What? Peanut butter? Oh yeah. So anyway, I walked into a bar with a priest, a rabbi, and the ghost of Liberace. The bartender asked us what we wanted to drink and I told him I had to do a review for Night of the Scarecrow. He understood and I went home, where I'm now typing this review. True story. That's why it's funny. Punchlines are for plebeians. With that, I've got a vote to cast in the next few hours and a movie about a scarecrow possessed by the soul of an evil warlock to review before that, so let's get these doggies rollin', “maverick” style and shit!

Claire Goodman was a small town girl from the bumblefuck burg of Hanford, until one day the bright lights of the big city beckoned her to seek her fortune elsewhere. Years after abandoning her small town friends and family, Claire has returned... for reasons unknown. Possibly for money. Her dad Bill is now the Hanford Mayor and is headlining a project to build Hanford its first shopping mall. You know, because small town folk need to go to Spencer's Gifts to buy fake turds, blacklight posters, and birthday cars with grotesque naked people on them just like everybody else! Dillon Hale is the foreman overseeing the construction of said monument to capitalism, and being a small town hunk that also makes him Claire's inevitable love interest because as the cliché goes, good things come in small (town) packages... note my repeated use of the term “small town”? It could be worse. I could just keep calling Hanford “real America”... or saying that the Vice-President runs the Senate... or say I have extensive world diplomacy experience because I live in an apartment building filled with Egyptians, Italians, Persians and Irish people that's maintained by a Pakistani guy and his Russian employee, and I order Mexican food delivered by a Lithuanian girl from a restaurant owned by Chinese people... Wow, in the words of my last date, “That's a mouthful!”

Besides her money hungry, “big city ways” hating, power brokering dad, Claire's got a very robust family, each member of which seems to fit into their own small town cookie-cutter character class. Uncle George is an alcoholic widower who's never seen without a beer in his mitts. He's also the farmer of the family, though he's giving up his bountiful fields for the good of mass consumerism and probably his own Orange Julius machine once it's all been paved over for the new mall. Uncle Thaddeus is the preacher constantly having a crisis of faith between not satisfying his emotionally devoid wife, trying to wall up his teenage daughter's hormones, and spiritually salt petering his own sinful libido. He also gives one heck of a grace speech before dinner. And here I thought I was the only one who enjoyed plague and pestilence festering just underneath the crispy surface of my chicken dinners... Lastly, Uncle Frank (Stephen Root) is the small town Sheriff who's always referring to Hanford as “MY town” and is ready at the drop of his small town sheriff hat to blame the deaths and supernatural phenomena of the titular terror on the movie's hero instead, thus making himself a big fat obstacle with a badge rather than an actual peace officer.

Hanford teen Danny (played by the liquor store clerk in From Dusk Till Dawn) likes to do what any small town guy his age does to keep himself from raping livestock: lots of underage drinking and general troublemaking. He works for Dillon, who can't get away with firing the little fart because Danny's daddy just happens to be Mayor Goodman's dutch rudder buddy, so he benefits from nepotism by proxy. Thanks to intoxicated boredom of Danny and his own rudder buddy, they steal the construction crew's sole bulldozer and plow through a cornfield, breaking a large stone slab buried under 1/4” of dirt at the feet of a scarecrow. The likes of which crows mysteriously die around. I guess Night of the Killcrow would've been a better title... and still could be if anyone's interested in producing a script written by a z-grade movie critic. Anyone? No? Okay, moving on then.

Seems that big stone slab over which the scarecrow was erected was the burial tomb of an evil warlock who was put there a century earlier by the Goodmans' ancestors. See, when the Goodies first settled the land it was the worst possible place for an agrarian society to set up shop, so the people accepted the offer of a local magic man to turn the land around for them in exchange for their promise to let him crash there and to not oppress him for his “unorthodox religious practices”. Of course this lead to him tempting the frightened Christian folk (none of which are what most would call attractive) into unholy orgies and the like. So, led by the town preacher, the Hanfordians used the warlock's own tome of black arts against him, crucifying him, burning his body, locking his bones in a special casket, and burying it in the heart of their massive corn field, sealed with the big stone slab. By keeping his remains around, the town would be guaranteed bountiful harvests and mad croppage till the end of time. Each generation erected a scarecrow over the spot to remind them of the horror that lay there and to stay the fuck away from it for fear of waking up an ancient being that entices people into getting' freaky with each other. I always wondered where Larry Flint got his start...

With the barrier slab slagged, the human Spanish Fly's soul inhabits the scarecrow and he goes agriculturally aggro on the kin of his captors as he seeks out what remains of his grimoire. Upon finding the book (and you know he will eventually), he can return his black soul to flesh and crank his power up to 11. As for what Scary has planned for his revenge bid, there's a thresher death for George, a sewn up mouth and severe barbed wire facial trauma for Thaddeus, a few knitting needles in the head of Thad's wife Barbara, and putting his seed (no, literally, it's a seed!) inside Thad's daughter Stephanie's stomach through which big roots grow from her body and plant her underground! Definitely the highlight of the movie, but not the end. We've still got Bill who ends up in a similar position with long strands of straw exploding out of every opening in his body (including eyes and ears, but we'll have to assume on the back door...), Frank who gets sickled up (as do a pair of his cop buddies) then dies from a Hellraiser acupuncture treatment, and Douche LaRouche Danny apparently gets “torn to pieces” but all we get to see of it is Scary advancing on the little weasel and making a bad “Hay there!” pun like some Podunk Freddy Krueger.

All this running around and arcane small town slaughter culminates sooner or later back at the construction site/corn field. The bones are exhumed, Scary loses an arm and gets blown up but keeps on keepin' on Terminator style, but then just when it looks like he might give Claire the same seeding he gave Steph, Dillon pulverizes the villain's ex-skeletal system and his scarecrow body literally explodes into a thousand pieces of bite-sized Halloween candy. I'd kill my next door neighbors if it meant I could get my lips on a little Mr. Goodbar right now... uhm, the candy not the guy... pervert.

When I originally reviewed NotS, I remember being blown away by the creatively gruesome death scenes and getting to see the mommy glands on the girl who played Stephanie. In the 8 or 9 years since then, I've seen a few thousand pairs of mommy glands (some for reals even!) and couldn't care less, but at least the more brutal brutalities portrayed are still, errr, brutal. The bits with the roots and straw shooting out of the characters' bodies reminded me of some of the crazy shit Japanese animation's scraped over our faces over the years, only the long tentacley things were coming out of a woman's body this time... Looking back upon its 90 minute runtime now, my overall enthusiasm's pretty tepid. I needed a little more sugar for my Kool-Aid and instead I feel like somebody gave me too much tap water. Scary himself looks pretty goofy for the most part, and the fact that he's a resurrected 19th century Satanist speaking “modern” English by saying shit like “Gotcha!” is a joke. Whether it's a ha-ha joke to you or a kick-in-the-cajones joke though depends on which way your frontal lobe is wired. More food for thought? Scary's “ancient” witchcraft instruction manual is written in plain English. Convenient for Dillon, who reads from it to learn about destroying the warlock (you'd think Scary would've burned that page long ago...), but inconvenient for the logic processors in my noodle caboodle. Heh heh, “caboodle”.

As usual, another object of my younger days has come back to spark my nose hairs with a barbecue lighter. Alright, that was something of an exaggeration, but you get the meaning of my spleening. Alright, so “spleening” isn't a word and I just made it up so I'd having something to rhyme with “meaning” besides “demeaning”. The point is that NofS has some passable acting, some decent music, and some interesting and well executed gore, but when your characters are cheap clones of the ones we've seen a hundred times over and your titular terror comes off like a half-assed clown from the other end of Elm Street, you pander to people who aren't me and thus sow the seeds of unhappiness with a guy whose hobby is recommending movies to the 4 or 5 people who stop by here every week or so. Doesn't mean I wouldn't be interested in a sequel though, cuz it wouldn't be hard to tighten the nuts and tweak the bolts on this and make something out of it. It'll probably never happen, but these days you never know what you'll see on the DVD shelves from week-to-week. Speaking of which, where the fuck did Return to Sleepaway Camp come from?!