Macabre…ish Horror Review: Scarecrows

 

 

Scarecrows aka Paratrooper, 1988/ 1 hr 23 min

 

A pilot and his daughter, Kelly (Victorian Christian), have their plane hijacked by criminals who robbed the Army payroll for 3.5 million dollars.  They demand to be flown to Mexico, but one of them, Bert (B.J Turner) has other plans and parachutes from the plane with the money. The others are in hot pursuit and they track him to a graveyard populated with scarecrows.

 

The group, with the pilot and his daughter, take refuge in a nearby condemned house but this is not normal house (weird things keep happening). And outside, are not normal scarecrows, while scanning for Burt, Jack (Richard Vidan) swears he saw one move and many are off their posts.

 

Bert does turn up at the house eventually, seemingly traumatized and sans money, so Corbin (Ted Vernon) beats the crap out of him. They realize something else is wrong with Bert, though he’s walking around, he’s been gutted and cash stuffed inside his abdominal cavity. So the crooks chop him up and salvage the cash that they can from the corpse, noting that he’s unusually light.

 

The pilot who ran off earlier is found in similar condition as Bert but hanging from a post. Cash is scattered everywhere and as the crooks pick it up, one by one the scarecrows converge on them.

 

Oh but no one goes down easy and the thing about these scarecrows is they are missing body parts and they can only get them from people. But if you shoot or hack them up, you’re making the problem worse because they cannot die and now they need more parts. Humans can become scarecrows though.

 

If the remaining few can somehow make it back to the plane, Kelly can fly but they have to somehow get there alive.

 

This is a very graphic movie, and when it is gory, it is very gory. Typical of 80s horror films, it takes a little while to get really good and some parts are a little long winded but the pay off is good. The movie is visually dark but not so dark that you can’t see pivotal moments. This is very nostalgic, if you liked House, you might like this.

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