Welcome to part 3 of my dollar store DVD deep dive, this time with the film Scarecrow’s Revenge. (Check here for a primer on what we’re doing and why.)
Today’s question: Why aren’t there more period slashers? Sure, you’ve got Fear Street: 1978, and Time Cut if you miss the Y2K era, to say nothing of the absolute ocean of retro-rocking Spandex slashers we’ve been drowning in for over a decade. But rewind more than half a century, and the pickings are slim.
Who wouldn’t want to see a proper Jack the Ripper movie through a Damien Leone lens? Or a jazz slayer picking off flappers in the roaring ‘20s? Courtly intrigue as a killer stalks the halls of Louis XIV’s Versailles? The slasher formula is so robust, you can put one just about anywhere. Well, director Louisa Warren must have had the same thought because she explored what hijinks a supernatural slasher scarecrow could get up to during the Viking occupation of England in the early Middle Ages in Scarecrow’s Revenge.
In northern England, a sleaze named Henerik (Peter Cosgrove) is banished from his Viking settlement for attempted sexual assault. Instead of making tracks, he sells his soul to the local lakeside witch (Kate Milner Evans) to become an unkillable scarecrow and starts gutting the unlucky locals. After the men have been killed, it’s up to the village chief’s daughter, Greta (Sarah Kohen), to fulfill her Viking destiny, slay the evildoer, and learn about herself in the process.
Respect to Warren for shaking up the slasher formula with a novel setting, and when all you need for mise-en-scene is a tunic and a cornfield, it frees up budget for creature and makeup effects. You never really feel like it’s the 9th century, though, and even though Warren keeps things moving, 97 minutes is a lot to ask from a microbudget indie.
RELATED: ‘Final Destination’ at 25: Death Is Still Coming for Us All
What did you do in 2019? I was a bridesmaid in my first-ever wedding, I had a hellish sciatica flareup that left me hobbled and sleepless for over a month, and I got my first big-boy living-wage career-type job. Overall, I think my 2019 was pretty eventful. All Louisa Warren did, on the other hand, was (checks notes) MAKE SIX WHOLE MOVIES!? In fact, in the last seven years, she has 32 feature directorial credits to her name. Most of them, like Scarecrow’s Revenge, came courtesy of ITN Distribution, the mockbuster factory behind the recent run of public-domain character splattershows: Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Peter Pan, among others.
Chortle all you want at ITN’s garish No Limit Records-style box covers and the five-figure budgets, but people who love movies are getting to make a living making movies, and at the very least, you have to respect the hustle.
As long as you know what you’re getting into, there’s some fun to be had with Scarecrow’s Revenge. It’s certainly no The Head Hunter, but given the surprising paucity of medieval-set horror movies, fans of swords ‘n spooks sometimes gotta take what we can get.
Misleading box art? Surprisingly, given the distributor’s track record, not really.
Decision: Dollar Store Decent
