samhainfest 2014: scarecrows

(1988. dir: William Wesley) We enter in media res: a band of toy-Rambos have stolen a metal box full of money from an army base, kidnapped a pilot and his nubile daughter, and are bound for the good life in Mexico. Somewhere over the badassed Confederate region of this fine country, however, one greedy bastard chucks the money out and bails after it. Before long, the lot of them are holed up in a house apparently protected by the ghosts of the three Confederate duckhunters whose photograph we keep seeing on the wall, but I don't know how anyone really knows that, other than that it's in the script. The place is lousy with scarecrows, and, one by one, each of our anti-heroes becomes one of the walking, hay-stuffed dead.

By no stretch of anyone's imagination does Messengers 2 need to worry about losing its championship title to this turkey. It looks bad, sounds bad, and the acting is largely mediocre, although Ted Vernon, whose vanity project it is, gives himself a low-key, strong-guy-in-the-background role, which is a nice surprise, and Michael David Simms does rather well with his breakdown scene. The scarecrows look pretty impressive when they're passive, but the effects are ho-hum. You could call it a gewissengeist venture, since at least one of the party feels badly enough about the dead MPs back on the airfield to freak out and give the are-we-really-dead-is-this-really-hell? speech, but there's no reason to give any of it too much thought.

That said, there are sufficient touches of interest to make it watchable. One of the revenants, Jack, has a great rictus-grin-under-the-night-vision-goggles look, and there's a "hey, whassup?" quality to his banter reminiscent of those immortal Undead Griffin Dunne scenes in American Werewolf in London. The exposition at beginning and end are carried by radio newscasts, which is efficient, provides a pleasant book-ended format, and evokes memories of past classics. The atmosphere, although clunkily low-budget, carries a continuing sense that something interesting MIGHT still happen, but, alas, it never does.