Tag Archives: bad movies

Horrible Horrors – “Curse of the Scarecrow”

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A vengeful scarecrow returns to life once every twenty years to kill anyone who happens to be in very, very close proximity to it. Never before has a horror movie antagonist been so fucking lazy.

Twenty years ago, June (Kate Lister) witnessed her parents being murdered in their family home. She’s still receiving therapy for it, from Karen (Cassandra French), the most condescending and arsey therapist ever to pick up a notepad and dispense chill pills. Karen’s therapeutic techniques appear to consist of pulling faces at June, implying that she’s a mental case, and drinking all of her wine. Not a bad gig if you can get it.

June no longer believes that a scarecrow killed her parents, reasoning that the trauma of what she witnessed created a false narrative designed to insulate her from the idea that a real, flesh-and-blood person could have done something so heinous. Karen senses that June is almost completely recovered, so comes up with a great idea: “Hey, why don’t you go back to your family home in time for the twentieth anniversary of your parents’ brutal murder? Tell you what, I’ll come with you. Hey, your brother lives there, doesn’t he? … He’ll have wine, right?”

Karen the therapist: the Karen-est of all Karens

That’s not the real dialogue, which is somehow actually worse than anything I could have come up with in jest. This is the sort of movie where everyone talks in exposition.

“Is that the coffee cup that holds enormous emotional resonance for you?”

“Yeah, it’s the cup I was drinking out of when my parents were murdered.”

“Wasn’t that 20 years ago?”

“Yes, to the day.”

“It’s funny I should be bringing all of this up given that we’ve been friends since we were kids.”

“That’s okay, Alice Jones of Number 35 Acacia Avenue, whom I met at the roller-skating rink on a windy Thursday in October when we were both seven.”

The doomed June. Kate Lister is actually a decent actress, doing her best with abysmal material.

The director, Louisa Warren (who also has a starring role as one of June’s friends), doesn’t like to innovate or interrogate a sequence, preferring instead – during indoor scenes, at least – to leave the camera static and cut between whomever is talking. This gives the movie the feel of a corporate training video, which I suppose is horrifying enough in its own right. It’s obvious, though, from the handful of aerial shots peppered throughout the movie that she’s got a mate with a helicopter.

By the time June and co. roll into town, June’s brother is already dead, killed by the scarecrow whose macabre legend with which he was so obsessed. Why he turned his back on the creature long enough for it to kill him when he believed wholeheartedly in its supernatural powers is anyone’s guess, but this decision is just one of many dumb decisions that come to taint the entire movie, decisions made by the characters, the production ‘team’ and the director.

Chanel (Tiffany-Ellen Robinson), a soon-to-be-doomed piece of scarecrow-fodder, chats with the duo of wine-drinking misery-hunters by the side of the road, and warns them not to go back to that farmhouse: June’s farmhouse. On a more affluent production the farmhouse would probably have looked suitably run-down, rustic and terrifying, but here it looks very expensive, with a brightly-lit, tastefully decorated interior. “Ooooh, I wouldn’t go prowling around that modern-looking, very spacious and immaculately kept building in a desirably affluent rural area if I were you! You’re asking for trouble, so you are!” Of course, many horror stories – I’m particularly thinking of MR James’ stories – have successfully subverted the safety of daytime to produce some of the most spine-tingling, sun-lit scares of the genre, but that isn’t the route this movie goes down. It more seems to be a case of, “This is my/my mother’s/my friend’s house. Fuck it, this’ll do.”

It’s here that I start to feel a little guilty for doing a hatchet job on the movie. This is a passion project that’s been conceived, executed and distributed on a tight budget, with only a small team behind and in-front of the camera. Why am I being such a dick about this? Well, there’s a simple answer to that:

I am a dick.

My favourite parts of the movie are, without question, Chanel’s death scene and Karen’s hypno-therapy session. In the former, Chanel is chased across a field by the scarecrow after it kills her boyfriend post-coitus (he was having sex with Chanel, obviously, not being pumped by the scarecrow), when she climbs over a small fence and cuts her knee. She proceeds to rock and writhe on the ground like a landmine victim. As the scarecrow closes in on her she holds a hysterical cry-face for literally twenty-five seconds, during which I laughed like a jolly, bearded lumberjack. Robinson’s performance was so unrestrained it made Moira Rose look like John Wick.

Karen shines again in the hypnosis scene, where she carries the tone of the woman in the TV studio on a treasure-hunt style TV game-show, whose job it is to berate the contestant for being so shite. Again I laughed. A lot. That my favourite parts of this horror movie are the two most unintentionally hilarious probably signals that the project has fallen rather short of its aim. Most of the dialogue in this movie feels ad-libbed – very badly, I may add – and is characterised by the kind of infuriating repetition your parents fall prey to in their twilight years.

And the scarecrow himself? It’s hard to work up a cold sweat of dread about a baddie whose presence is signalled by the sound of a bell on a little girl’s bike. Plus, he’s about as scary as a lumpy, middle-aged man crammed into a bargain-bin scarecrow costume, which is exactly what he is. I again defy you not to laugh when he finishes off a victim by shoving straw into her mouth.

The most terrifying thing about this movie comes in the final few seconds, where things are clearly being set up for a sequel. People of the UK, I implore you: hide, ideally burn, all of the scarecrow costumes. If you have a helicopter, do NOT lend it to the director. Let’s pray this particular cursed scarecrow never makes a comeback. Not in twenty years. Not in a hundred years.

Still, if you’re looking for a few daft laughs as you’re working your way through a batch of herbal, I suppose you could do worse than Sleepers Creepers here.

Year: 2018

Run-time: 84 mins

Studio: Proportion Productions

Director: Louisa Warren

Bad Bad Shit or Good Bad Shit: Good Bad Shit (sub-category: Funny Bad Shit)

Horrible Horrors – “Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill”

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Like westerns? Like zombie movies? Like slashers? Well, you’re going to absolutely hate this. Even if you like zombie-western-slashers you’ll probably hate this.

It’s like a succession of shlock-horror vignettes alternating with mini music-videos, with the only real consistency in the movie being the panto-esque acting and excruciating (though occasionally unintentionally hilarious) dialogue.

The movie begins in the desert with a drug dealer being pursued in a low octane car chase by a police woman, who of course breaks off pursuit when the dealer hurls a mound of coke from his car and it bursts all over her windscreen.  A little tip for you killers out there: this also works with murder weapons. Just throw your bloody knife or smoking gun at the pursuing law enforcement vehicle and, BINGO, you’ve got away with it. Most of the movie’s landscapes are bleached, much like the atmospheric Mexican vistas in the movie Traffic, while the movie itself is about as entertaining as being stuck in actual traffic.

The dealer’s car breaks down and he finds himself at Sunset Valley, a mysterious ghost town that, unfortunately for Mr No-Blow Escobar, is filled to the gunnels with zombies, who waste no time in, well, wasting him. Their leader is the vengeful Bloody Bill, a Confederate soldier consumed with eternal wrath following his long-ago execution.

A little later, a mini-bus containing a debate team is hijacked by Earl, the earlier drug dealer’s pissed-off partner. They, too, end up in Sunset Valley, and proceed to be picked off by the undead. Beyond the principals’ broad character types – hick; screaming beauty; bad-ass babe; mouthy smart arse; preachy do-gooder; angry black drug dealer – there isn’t much to commend them as actual people that you might bring yourself to give a single, solitary shit about: Earl, the dealer, shouts about drugs, money and killing people; and the debate team spend a fair amount of time actually debating things, which doesn’t make for a particularly arresting zombie-slasher flick.

‘So you’re saying the beliefs of the world’s three major religions are invalid?’ asks one of the unfortunates, seeming genuinely upset.

‘No, I’m saying they’re unsubstantiated. There’s a difference.’

The writers obviously thought to themselves: ‘Well, we’ve made these guys debate champions. We’d better have them randomly debate things every once in a while.’ I guess we can be thankful that they weren’t written as champion Morris Dancers, although at least that would’ve been funny.

The not-quite-yet-fully-zombified dealer from the start of the movie shows up at one point, screaming at the doomed congregation: ‘Bloody Bill! He’ll find you!’ Of course he’ll find you, I thought to myself. The town’s only got about seven buildings in it. It wouldn’t exactly take a hide-and-seek champion.

It’s clear that the director, Byron Werner, wants to show off the toolkit of techniques he learned in film school – bleaching, colour filters, jerky cuts – without ever marrying them to mood or effect. The zombies appearances are mostly scored to goth rock, which really helps capture that old timey, Civil War feel. I should have felt dread at the zombies’ arrival, not get the sense that my six-year-old son had just accidentally flicked the channel to a 24-hour station specialising in German heavy-metal music. In fairness, Werner shows himself to be a very capable and inventive cinematographer, and adept at crafting effective sequences, he just doesn’t appear to care much about threading it all together to achieve consistency of tone or vision. It wasn’t much of a surprise to discover that Byron Werner has indeed gone on to enjoy a lucrative career directing the music videos of some very well known artists. So, in a way, this movie was his audition reel. And good luck to the guy. He’s obviously got talent.

Not so the editor or the people in charge of continuity. Not only do we see a two-lane track suddenly become a one-track lane during a crucial (almost) collision, but at one point Earl is caught mouthing the line of one of the other characters as they’re speaking it (that’s probably my favourite bit of the movie).

Earl’s death is also my favourite, for reasons both good and bad. Good, because he goes to his reasonably noble death with a face-full of crack daubed on his face like war-paint, and live grenades in his clutches. And bad, because the special effects budget couldn’t supply Earl with a worthy, flashy enough send-off. We should’ve seen a slow-mo blow-out, as a fireball smashed through the building and engulfed the first floor, sending fiery debris and shards of glass shooting after the screaming women. What we saw was, em, sort of close to that: a wee puff of black smoke slowly drifting out of a window, like a freshly-released genie just couldn’t be arsed making a grand entrance.

Bloody Bill himself doesn’t look too bad, as far as straight-to-video villains go. He’s like a low-budget Leatherface, or the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers, but without much of the creepiness, or indeed jeeperiness. I won’t tell you how the film’s lone survivor manages to bring down Bloody Bill. Not because I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s just that I don’t really care enough to tell you.

Some of the gore is commendable, some of the film’s sequences undeniably are well shot, and there are a few unmeant but magical laughs, but even if you’re a connoisseur of shit movies like me you might still want to give this one a miss.

Year: 2004

Run-time: 88 Minutes

Studio: The Asylum

Director: Byron Werner

Bad Bad Shit or Good Bad Shit? Bad Bad Shit.