SCARECROWS plus THE CHILDREN 10/31/07
SCARECROWS (Wesley, 1988): Something of a diamond in the rough, and undiscovered treat! I'd never even hear
d of this thing until it was released on the same day on DVD as THE BURNING. Kind of a post-ALIENS military horror flick. Plot has on-the-run Spec Ops thieves fleeing in a stolen airplane with $3 mil in loot. One guy stabs the others in the back and bails out over the sticks with the money and the others must land and pursue him. Trouble is, there are spooky SCARECROWS hanging (har har har) around, intent on replacing their lost body parts with new ones gleaned from the cast. Attrition follows.
d of this thing until it was released on the same day on DVD as THE BURNING. Kind of a post-ALIENS military horror flick. Plot has on-the-run Spec Ops thieves fleeing in a stolen airplane with $3 mil in loot. One guy stabs the others in the back and bails out over the sticks with the money and the others must land and pursue him. Trouble is, there are spooky SCARECROWS hanging (har har har) around, intent on replacing their lost body parts with new ones gleaned from the cast. Attrition follows.Movie manages to drum up a high level of tension and atmosphere and after a dodgy first half filled with too much wandering and seeking we finally get a decent gorefest with lots of chasing and a fairly quick clip. Lots and lots of unexpected dismemberments and beheadings and the like. Plenty of weapons fire and a high percentage of night vision shots which must have seemed tres moderne in 1988. Best sequence involves the team acquiring their traitorous ex-buddy only to discover his entrails have been removed and replaced with all the filthy lucre ... Which is odd considering he is still walking around and whatnot. Not even dismembering him shuts him up and they have to put his head in a freezer!!!
THE CHILDREN (Kalmanowicz, 1980): God how I loathe drive-in fare from the years 1976-1980, mostly because everything I
've seen from that era just feels made for TV, only with the added bonus of a couple bare boobs and a few swear words like "hand job" such as heard in this one. It was a real struggle resisting the urge to fast forward through this one but since I doubted there would be any "good parts" to fast forward TO ... I just stuck with it. Super lame and dated affair has a bunch of little pukes with Dorothy Hamill haircuts getting irradiated and hugging their parents to death, resulting in scary papier machiee fright masks and yellow smoke that looks noxious. It does have some admittedly awesome child death scenes, including one blown off a flight of stairs by a shotgun blast, and several of them get their hands chopped off by a Samurai sword whose presence may have been motivated but it escapes me now just how it got there. Anyway the hand-chopping looks UTTERLY PHONY but at least the notion is cool. This movie is pretty much CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED, only lame. The kids look like they are having too much fun "being in a movie" and blow near every take with those damn fool grins of theirs. I was happy when they all died instead of getting some bogus eleventh-hour cure. Nope, just kill em. I'd been saying that all along!
've seen from that era just feels made for TV, only with the added bonus of a couple bare boobs and a few swear words like "hand job" such as heard in this one. It was a real struggle resisting the urge to fast forward through this one but since I doubted there would be any "good parts" to fast forward TO ... I just stuck with it. Super lame and dated affair has a bunch of little pukes with Dorothy Hamill haircuts getting irradiated and hugging their parents to death, resulting in scary papier machiee fright masks and yellow smoke that looks noxious. It does have some admittedly awesome child death scenes, including one blown off a flight of stairs by a shotgun blast, and several of them get their hands chopped off by a Samurai sword whose presence may have been motivated but it escapes me now just how it got there. Anyway the hand-chopping looks UTTERLY PHONY but at least the notion is cool. This movie is pretty much CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED, only lame. The kids look like they are having too much fun "being in a movie" and blow near every take with those damn fool grins of theirs. I was happy when they all died instead of getting some bogus eleventh-hour cure. Nope, just kill em. I'd been saying that all along!
posted by figurebuilder at 10:41 AM
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