CURSE OF THE SCARECROW * UK 2018 Dir: Louisa Warren 84 mins
A young woman returns to her families farm where 20 years earlier she and her brother witnessed their parents murder at the hands of what seemed to be a scarecrow. Legend has it that hundreds of years ago on that land villagers caught a thief and strung him up to be eaten by crows. It is said now that for 2 days every 20 years his spirit returns in the form of a scarecrow to kill whoever owns the farm or wanders into the land as a way of seeking his revenge.
After years of therapy June is ready to contact her brother, Carl and return home. Now convinced she was mistaken by the identity of her parents killer Carl is not so sure and warns her that it is coming up to the twentieth anniversary of their death and not to come over, strangely that night it is reported to June that Carl has committed suicide. Now forced to return to the farm June brings her friend, Nancy and her therapist Karen along to face her fears for the final time. In all honesty this is a truly abysmal attempt at yet another scarecrow slasher, it’s poorly acted all the characters are wooden, unconvincing and instantly forgettable. It is badly written and a lot of the direction and camera angles were muddled and odd in an unfavorable way. It’s one redeeming feature is its effective soundtrack composed by Aaron Strefford which is very well done and quite eerie. The most annoying part for me is the constant repetition of the fact that the scarecrow returns every 20 years which we are informed of constantly from the beginning yet it seems to be a huge revelation to the characters when you know that they already know this fact because they have been discussing it from the start. The scarecrow itself was quite scary looking yet lacked any presence when it moved and didn’t feature a whole lot. The cast involved director Louisa Warren as June’s friend Nancy. She was by far the most misplaced character out of the lot of them. She constantly looked awkward and nervous almost like she was about to crack a joke but never actually did. Kate Lister was June and Cassandra French as Karen are marginally better then the rest but not by much. Everyone else is just a mess of dodgy accents and awful one liners. There is nothing really in the way of effects or much blood either, it just plays out like another God awful slasher by numbers gig that has nothing good going for it at all bar the soundtrack.