Cody ventures into Scarecrow County, the second film directed by John Oak Dalton.
While filming John Oak Dalton's feature directorial debut The Girl in the Crawlspace in Indiana farmland (even doing some filming in a town actually called Farmland), producer/cinematographer Henrique Couto was drawing inspiration from the popular 1981 TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow. Since Couto mentioned it, Dalton watched Dark Night of the Scarecrow during production, and conversations they had about the movie after that led to them coming up with the idea to make their own scarecrow horror movie. Like The Girl in the Crawlspace, Scarecrow County was written and directed by Dalton with Couto producing and serving as cinematographer.
Another entry in a sub-genre Dalton and Couto are calling "Hoosiersploitation", Scarecrow County takes us back to the picturesque Indiana farmland (and the town of Farmland) seen in The Girl in the Crawlspace for the story of a group of middle-aged men who share a secret from their high school days, a secret that resurfaces all these decades later in the form of a possibly supernatural scarecrow that starts knocking them off one-by-one. While Dark Night of the Scarecrow gave the reason for its supernatural scarecrow action right up front, Scarecrow County waits to give all the information on what's going on here, dropping clues along the way.
The group at the center of the story consists of Brownie (Tom Cherry), Si (Jeff Shull), L.Q. (Joe Skeen), and Cotton (Jeff Rapkin), and while it takes a while for us to understand what their secret is, it is interesting to see how they react when they learn that something from their past is threatening their well-being and/or their social standing. Their loved ones get pulled into this mess as well, especially Brownie's librarian daughter Winnie (Chelsi Kern) and his shut-in artist daughter Zoe (Rachael Redolfi).
My favorite thing about The Girl in the Crawlspace was how distinctly John Oak Dalton it was. A lot of filmmakers could have made a movie out of the basic subject matter - a young woman escapes after being held captive in a crawlspace for years - but only Dalton's would have involved an RPG group, fan fiction, and Spaghetti Western fandom. I was glad to find that Scarecrow County is also purely John Oak Dalton. Anyone could make a movie about a slasher scarecrow, several have before, but who other than Dalton would think to make the Zoe character a comic book artist who is determined to improve the reputation of public domain character Fantomah? And it goes further, as Zoe sees Fantomah as a friend and hears the character speaking to her from her drawings. I certainly didn't expect this movie to feature scenes of a woman having conversations with drawings when I first heard of it.
Fantomah is voiced by the girl from the crawlspace herself, Erin R. Ryan, part of an interesting approach Dalton took to casting this movie. The three leads from Crawlspace - Ryan, Joni Durian, and John Bradley Hambrick - are all in here, but in smaller roles, while actors who had smaller roles in Crawlspace - Cherry, Kern, and Redolfi - are promoted to lead roles. All of the actors in the movie are quite good, with Cherry bringing some unexpected emotion to his role, Kern being the likeable heroine we follow through the film, and Redolfi doing a great job as her very unique character.
Dalton and Couto brought a cool visual style to the scenes involving the scarecrow, bathing sets in colorful lighting and pumping fog into them, capturing great images like a shot of the backlit scarecrow standing in a doorway. That particular shot also gets repeated with Zoe in place of the scarecrow. There's not a whole lot of slashing in the movie, but the moments with the scarecrow are fun and there's plenty of mystery and drama between the slashing to hold the viewer's attention.
The filmmakers also gave the production value a boost with some well-used stock footage (the fire footage that plays out under the title sequence is especially impressive) and taking clever advantage of locations and props they had access to, like a mansion that belonged to someone involved with the movie and a garage full of classic cars.
Dalton wanted to appeal to a wider audience with this movie (he was admittedly underestimating the appeal of The Girl in the Crawlspace), but he certainly brought his own personal vision to the very marketable concept of a scarecrow slasher. In doing so, he crafted a great second film and has ensured that I will continue to watch anything he directs.
Scarecrow County is now available on DVD and Blu-ray, and you can pick up a copy at Henflix.com.
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