Scarecrow Gone Wild. 2004. Written and directed by Brian Katkin. Distributed by York Entertainment.
The good news: In spite of the title, this movie does not feature a bunch of scarecrows getting inebriated, removing their clothes, and touching each other, then regretting it when a late-night commercial airs six months later and shows their indiscretions to their scarecrow parents, who believed that their little scarecrows had really gone on a Habitat for Humanity retreat for Spring Break.
The bad news is that this movie does feature an acting turn by former UFC champ Ken Shamrock.
Anyone who was a fan of the WWF (as it was known at the time) in the late ‘90s will remember Shamrock’s move into the world of Professional Wrestling. Pro Wrestling, for better or for worse, really does require at least a little bit of acting talent to handle the various soap-opera plotlines. None of these guys will ever be Oscar-winners* (although The Rock has at least shown some talent), but the better ones have enough personal magnetism to at least help build and sell a character (Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Hunter Hearst Helmsley).
Ken Shamrock, on the other hand, has the personal magnetism of a horsefly. Mind you, at the time he signed with the WWF, he was “the world’s most dangerous man,” and he had enough fighting skills to hold his own. Once someone handed him a microphone, however, it was painful to watching him attempt to emote.
When I saw that Shamrock was in this movie, I assumed that he’d be the titular killer (not dissimilar from last year’s
See No Evil, which cast Glen “Kane’ Jacobs as the bad guy). But no. We get Shamrock as a baseball coach. A baseball coach who cares about his kids, and who carries around a Dark Secret.
God help us all.
The movie opens with a “flashback” to a young teen girl running for her life in a cornfield. After a few minutes, she makes it to the haystacks in the middle, where she’s quickly dispatched by a Scarecrow (it should be noted that this film is not, technically, related to the other recent
Scarecrow movies).
We then pull out of the story to realize that this was actually a local legend being recounted by Mike, the captain of the baseball team. He and his co-captain, Jack, are hazing the freshman baseball players at Generic Local University. The fact that the entire baseball team seems to consist of exactly nine players probably doesn’t bode well for their chances, even before any possible murder sprees.
Jack and Mike (along with the other veterans, a trio of stereotypically sleazy jocks) are planning on taking the players out to the cornfield and scaring them. But Coach Ken Shamrock catches wind of this and forbids his players from hazing the noobs. The captains promise to just take the freshmen to the beach, and Ken believes them (although he does make it clear that breaking a promise is the worst thing a human being could ever possibly do).
We get two more doses of exposition, as Jack chats briefly with his diabetic freshman buddy Sam, who clearly has no interest in joining the team. With only eight players, they’d be hosed, so he agrees for the sake of his friend.
After this, we meet the female characters, consisting of female jock Beth (lust-interest of both Jack and Sam), and three interchangeable bimbettes, who are distinguished by being the girlfriend of a jock, the girl that that jock cheated with, and the possible love interest of Mike.
Jack and Beth decide to go for a jog, and while they do, Mike and the other jocks (and girlfriends) take the freshmen to the “beach.” Of course, Mike decides that a baseball team without hazing is as unimaginable as a baseball team with backup players and relief pitchers, so they detour to the cornfield.
The usual hazing rituals ensue – alcohol is consumed, jocks strip other jocks down to their underpants**, and the diabetic kid goes into insulin shock. Not understanding what Sam is going through (and assuming that he’s fucking with them), Mike strings Sam up next to the Scarecrow in the middle of the cornfield, and they head off to the beach. At the last minute, Mike realizes he might have fucked up a bit, so he sends the other three freshmen back to free Sam. He and his buddies head off to the beach, expecting the froshes to walk.
Meanwhile, Jack and Beth, upon finishing their jog, realize that they’re both turned on by sweaty jocks, and head back to her place, where he makes sweet love to her all night long. Twice, in fact. And since his cell phone is on vibrate, he doesn’t hear it ring when Mike calls him to say that something’s wrong.
Back at the cornfield, the now-comatose Sam's vengeful spirit has possessed the Scarecrow. How? We never find out. Let’s just stick to “because,” and move on.
Two of the freshmen (the third was picked off by the Scarecrow without the others hearing it) find Sam’s body, and one has the brains to call Coach Shamrock and leave him a message saying that something’s wrong. Both kids soon get dispatched by the killer, however.
Fast-forward to the next day, where the jocks are now hanging at the beach. Jack gets the message that something went wrong, heads to the cornfield, and with Beth’s help, they get Sam to the only medical assistance they can find: an abandoned hospital being run by Beth’s ex-brother-in-law.
Seriously***.
Jack and Beth briefly get into a fight, as Jack feels guilty that he was schtupping her instead of watching out for his buddy. He then tells her how Sam got him through the tough times as a kid, when Jack was a junkie and ready to commit suicide. After those touching moments, they decide to head to the beach.
At the beach, we get some brief character development, as the “storyline” involving the jock who cheated on his girlfriend comes to a head when the girlfriend finds out. She runs off over a dune, he runs after her, and after he explains the extenuating circumstances (he was drunk and horny), she’s willing to at least talk it out with him. But he hears a noise, checks it out, and is never seen (alive) again. After waiting patiently, his girlfriend follows, sees his body, is dragged across the sand, escapes, and eventually has her head bashed in. Never has so extended a death sequence been so boring.
The Other Woman soon gets hers, as the Scarecrow leaps out of the water and drowns her. Gotta love giant bags of straw that can swim stealthily.
Jack and Beth get there and confront Mike (who, to his credit, notes that since Jack helped Sam fake his team drug and medical tests, no one knew he was diabetic), and soon just start hanging around and moping.
This takes us to nightfall, when Generic Jock #2 plays his guitar. While all his friends are enjoying the music, the Scarecrow walks up to the nearby volleyball net and listens along with them (at this point, he’s standing not twenty feet away). As the song ends, Scarecrow decides that he didn’t like the song all that much, picks up the pole of the net, and throws it at the singer, impaling him. Scarecrow then, amidst the chaos, strangles the last generic jock.
The four surviors run and hide in a shack, and soon run into, of all people, Coach Shamrock. See, Coach had checked his voicemail and gotten the message. And it turns out that when he was in college, Coach Shamrock had played a hazing trick on one of his buddies**** that resulted in that guy’s death, and that guy came back as the Scarecrow and killed all of Ken’s friends before getting bored. As the Scarecrow finally finds the heroes, Ken grabs the beast and sacrifices himself, and the kids run off.
They make it to the road, where the final bimbette attempts to flag down a passing car. Only, guess what? That car’s driven by the Scarecrow! One hit-and-run later, we’re down to three.
Our survivors get a car and make it back to the Lamest Hospital Ever, where they assist the doctor and the nurse in trying to revive Sam (which should then kill the Scarecrow). Alas, both the doctor and the nurse get killed in the process, but our resilient jocks realize that defibrillating Sam also hurts the Scarecrow. So they defibrillate Sam about thirty times, and he wakes up (somehow), and the Scarecrow vanishes. Everyone (aside from the dead people) is happy.
Three weeks later (with no mention of police investigations of all the dead kids), we see that Coach is still alive, and that he’s quitting to manage a minor league baseball team (since his current team of three players is pretty much pointless). Things seem mostly idyllic, until Sam, out of nowhere, stabs Mike in the chest with an insulin needle! A look in the mirror shows that the Scarecrow has somehow possessed Sam!
Sam strings Mike up on a basketball net, then kills Coach Shamrock offscreen (but we see a body this time). Jack and Beth soon find the bodies, and the typical Final Fight ensues, eventually ending in a church. In a move straight out of
The Exorcist, Jack somehow gets possessed by the Scarecrow, and realizing this, he impales himself, thus freeing up Sam to date Beth and destroying the curse of the Scarecrow.
This movie is, as you’ve probably guessed, pretty terrible. Writer-director Brian Katkin’s streak of bad direct-to-DVD flicks is unbroken here, and after Shamrock, the cast consists entirely of folks with nearly no experience, and little chance of getting much more (only lead Samantha Aisling turns in a decent performance). The f/x are largely irrelevant, as almost all of the kills are off-screen, and boring as could be (even the one impalement is mostly offscreen, with only a small blood-spurt from the mouth).
Definitely toss this one in the “don’t bother” pile.
*It’s worth mentioning that David Arquette is a former WCW World Wrestling Champion. But he’ll never be an Oscar winner, either.
** At some level, this entire movie attempts to mimic the homosexual subtexts of films like Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and Witchboard. Unfortunately, it fails, and it’s hard to tell if it fails because the writer/director is just lousy, or because the subtext is too, well, sub, and the writer/director isn’t even aware that he’s using it.
*** Okay, it was actually a trauma center that was technically open, but still under construction. But still – one doctor, one nurse, and no other hospitals nearby at all?
**** There’s probably an Owen Hart joke to be made here. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}