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Scarecrow (2002)


Cast:

Tiffany Shepis is Judy Patterson
Tim Young is Lester Dwervick
Jen "Could I be anymore strumpety?" Richey is Morgan
Roxanna Bina is Stephanie
John Moore is Chad
Todd Rex is the Scarecrow


What the box says:

Pushed to the edge, lonely teenager Lester finally makes a friend in the Sheriff's daughter Judy. But when he sees her pkiss another boy that's the last straw. He picks a fight with his mom's boyfriend, and Lester is brutally slain and left hanging from a tree.

One year later, Judy discovers that Lester's spirit, trapped in the cornfiled's Scarecrow, is wreaking vengeance on the town. Haunting the cornfields, the Scarecrow slices a path of blood thru his former tormentors. As the bodies pile up, Judy fights tooth and nail to destroy the sinister creature before he makes her his next kill.


Plot:

Lester is frantically doodling.

A scarecrow and a broody guy are being interposed.

Some tattooed punks are on the side of the road when their car breaks down. Something is out there. It shoves a pole through the guy’s chest.

Taleteller is partaking of the reefer and telling of the guy who died in the previous scene. He will tell his suburban ghetto white boys a story they haven’t heard before. They will hear the tale of Lester.

In high school, a history teacher ridicules Lester for zoning out in class. She insults him for having a slightly immoral fornicating tramp of a mother.

At lunch, some jocks trip Lester. Later that day, they knock him down again.

Morgan, the blonde strumpet cheerleader, pines for Chad, the idiot bully football player, to her friend Judy, the pseudo-punk chick. Well, Judy isn’t impressed by a jock that trips Lester.

Lester tries to apologize to the teacher. Well, she insults him again. You’d think a teacher that bitter would be better selling insurance or working at the DMV.

In the afternoon, Lester gives a drawing to Stephanie, the kool-aid red head headed cheerleader. Lester asks her to Prom and gets shot down in a blaze of lameness. Greg, another bully jock, mocks the defenseless Lester more.

Pseudo Loreena McKennitt music ensues. Lester heads back to his trailer. He wakes up his Mom from her alcoholic stupor.

At the French Bulldog, the local teen hangout, Lester is bussing tables and getting even hassled more than at school. Chad picks on him until Judy stands up for Lester. What happens next is even more amazing, the boss with a French accent kicks Judy out for disturbing everyone.

Morgan gets into an argument with Judy about Lester. According to the bimbo cheerleader school of philosophy, if you are uncool enough, you deserve to be harassed by every clique imaginable. Judy thinks it isn’t right to sadistically torture others for fun.

Lester is haunted by visions of everyone that torments him. He fantasizes about beating Chad to death with baseball bat.

The next day, everyone ignores Lester at school. He thanks Judy for standing up for him and wants to repay her.

Later, Lester is frantically drawing his thank you to Judy.

Morgan drags Judy to a party. She pretty much tosses Judy to the wolves. Chad starts trying to put the movies on Judy by spouting all kind of crap about how he feels psychologically compelled to feel good about himself by tearing others down.

Lester is still hard at work when Mom staggers in with her boyfriend. As the guy insults Lester, our hassled teenager starts to fixate on Judy. When the redneck boyfriend tears up Lester’s drawings, Lester runs out of the trailer.

At the party, Judy is enjoying the intoxicating beverages. A backyard party scene demonstrates that drunken guys should drop acid to bad rock bands. Bad frat party ensues.


"I'm wiggin' out man...Killer scarecrows....Dude!!!"

Lester is outside the party.

Chad learns that Judy is the daughter of the sheriff. A slightly tipsy Judy is steadied by Chad. As she leaves, Chad kisses her. Lester seeing it runs off. Judy isn’t able to catch up and explain what happened.

Lester is in the cornfield and prays to be like the scarecrow to not care or feel pain. Haley, the farmer, runs him off.

Lester storms back into the trailer to find the boyfriend partaking a bit of rump roast. The man starts beating Lester and chases him into a nearby cornfield. The man chokes Lester to death. He even has the audacity to claim Lester caused him to do it. Mom is threatened if she spills the beans.

Lester’s soul enters the nearby scarecrow.

The man stages a suicide to cover Lester’s death.

A newspaper article tells of Lester’s suicide but the high school graduation went on as originally planned. Judy is about the only person at the graveside service for Lester. Mom throws out her son-murdering boyfriend.

Kids check on the scarecrow in the field.

ONE YEAR LATER…A drunk man is griping about Lester. Suddenly, a ninja scarecrow decapitates him.

Morgan is working at the Bulldog place if hitting on an alcoholic failed jock is working.

At the field, a couple of twerps toss rocks at the scarecrow. They don’t notice it’s alive.

Chad, Morgan, Stephanie, and Greg arrive at the cornfield. Chad and Morgan want some privacy. I guess some pom-poms are gonna get buffed.

Greg and Stephanie are on their own. Let the loving begin.

Scarecrow whacks Greg. The hysterical Stephanie brings Chad and Morgan. Chad searches and vanishes crying for help before reappearing unharmed.

The sheriff questions Stephanie about Greg. They’ll search into it.

Later, the sheriff asks Judy, his daughter, about Stephanie. He doesn’t mention the missing guy.

Back in the cornfield, Farmer Haley finds a bloody cob near the scarecrow.

Twerps are roaming in the field again and find the dead Greg. The scary thing is these kids aren’t bothered by it. The police arrive and question the potential Ed Geins of tomorrow. They’re getting all hot about the dead body.

Stephanie brings her father, the gravedigger, his lunch.

That night, some punks are smoking in the woods. Scarecrow rapidly kills them for no real reason.

Morgan and Chad have some kind of angsty fight vaguely reminiscent of those pointless WB teen dramas. Chad gets out of his car to partake of a certain illegal substance. Scarecrow arrives and stabs Chad in the ear with an ear of corn.


No actor will escape a death by ear of corn with any dignity.
Morgan is freaked out by this and runs off.

The teacher is staying late to grade and complain about the parentage of her students. Scarecrow appears and shish-kabobs her with a memo spike through the head.

The cops find Chad.

Mom is slaving for her new scummy drunken abusive boyfriend. A lame knock on the door gag ensues. Scarecrow takes care of another violent redneck.

Flashback to how Mom’s old boyfriend killed Lester. He also explains how he awoke in the body of a scarecrow unable to feel anything. Lester is about to kill her but runs away.

Cops have another call.

At the Bulldog, Scarecrow deep fries his former boss’s face.

Cops find Lester’s Mom and her dead boyfriend.

Scarecrow is back in the field. The cops talk with Haley the farmer. He mentions the bloody scarecrow.

Scarecrow leaps off into action.

The cops and Haley check and find the scarecrow gone. The farmer knew how evil lurks in this town.

Stephanie is walking home when scared by Greg. Scarecrow rips the guy’s heart out.

Stephanie attempts to kung fu the ninja Scarecrow. However, she isn’t very effective against her opponent. Scarecrow leaps away. Stephanie starts to freak out over the dead boyfriend.

The cops and Haley suspect that Lester is involved somehow.

Sheriff calls Judy and asks about Lester. He learns that the night Lester died he saw Judy and Chad kiss. He heads into action.

More Pseudo-Enya music ensues over the accelerated sundown shot.

Gravedigger runs into the Scarecrow. Lester-crow gets clubbed with the shovel for a while. The gravedigger gets to round 2 before being decapitated with his own shovel.

Judy is at home unaware of the Scarecrow disconnecting the phone.

Sheriff and his deputy race to Judy.

Scarecrow does some witty comment about how killing Judy will be payback.

The cops open fire on the Scarecrow. The deputy gets kung fued rapidly. Lestercrow promptly removes the Sheriff from the land of the living.

Judy hits Lestercrow point blank in the head to no avail. She heads outta Dodge with Lester following her.

He falls off the car but does a gymnastic routine that Mary Lou Retton would be proud of nonetheless.

Judy is able to pin Lester to the wall with the truck. Pouring gas on him, he manages to get away from the truck. Judy tosses a lighter on him. Par broiled Lestercrow ensues.

Back to the narrator and his stoner disciples, Judy only made Lester stronger by burning him. Lester’s soul is still loose. The junkies wonder what happened to everyone who survived.

Apparently, Stephanie went nuts after the scarecrow killing her boyfriend and father.

Farmer Haley found religion and tried to pray the evil out of his field.

Lester’s Mom is with child.

Judy runs into Morgan at college. Apparently, the paramedics found her out of it after killing the scarecrow. Judy starts acting awfully funny. Morgan gets freaked out and bids a hasty goodbye.

At art class, Judy is doing a painting entitled “Screams of Jock About to Die.”

The story ended 2 years ago. The narrator has the surprise ending for his junkie acolytes by calling for Lester.

Suddenly, Lestercrow appears in the cornfield to kill the junkies.


What I say:

My apologies to DC Comics and Cillian Murphy for having to use the name Scarecrow so much in this review.

A lot of movies have the pickled on kid, normally, the nerd is portrayed as being socially awkward and hated by the idiot jocks. Well, if nerds are going to be mocked in movies, I'm entitled to ridicule the brain dead ball playing morons. Back on track, Lester isn't a nerd that would imply he had at least some intelligent. He would have needed drugs to been one of the brain dead jock stoners in the back of class.

It isn't hard to have a hassled kid suffer indignities before gaining revenge on those that wronged him. An unspoken situation that happens in a lot of schools is how the kid gets picked on by a group and is unable to fight back. It happens a lot in comic books. Well, it becomes more like Spiderman chosing between doing what was right and the consequences he has to pay all his life for not doing what is right that one time. Scarecrow has a nasty sense of wish fulfillment. "You wronged me, and I'm gonna get back at you." Maybe, if the characters had more depth than say a single sheet of paper, these characters could only be more evil if they twirled mustaches and tied girls to train tracks.

Somehow having jocks that torment some classmate with quips that Jimbo and Nelson off the Simpsons would find to be lame. "Have a nice trip." A 6 year old bully would have provided better one-liners than "Hope you enjoy your fall" and been truly embarrassed to use such pathetic attempted one-liners.

These have to be some of the oldest teenagers this side of Archie and the gang from Riverdale atarring in Archie: Return to Riverdale. Maybe the timeline of the story is why they're so old. Taleteller tells the story of Lester. He had all the suffering before being killed. One year later, he becomes the Scarecrow.

One of the big problems is the characters. Were there any characters you felt sorry that the Scarecrow whacked? I never though that the slasher movies of the 80s were any good at creating memorable characters. However, the weakest cast of any of the Friday the 13th movies is light years and Dostievisky away from these people. They were all deserving of what they got.

I've seen movies where teachers mock students. However, calling them white trash with promisiscious mothers is a bit extreme. If a teacher is going to be that bitter about the gawky picked on kid, shouldn't they go full force of the alochol soaked brain dead jocks?

I can easily tear this movie a new one and make sure the old one was wide enough. It would be too easy to do that. Scarecrow had a few decent ideas. However, a lot of execution killed whatever it had going for it.

How many songs or movies have the scene where the guy spots the girl being kissed by someone else? To be fair, Lester had a crush or a blooming stalking relationship with Judy.

The timeline for the movie is very screwy. Lester is killed. It seems that his mother's boyfriend is just being let out of jail when he is killed. It is implied no one knew that Lester was actually murdered. So how soon after the recently unjailed boyfriend is killed, did Mom pick up another abusive drunken inbred redneck?

I have a hard time believing a drunken redneck would be able to hide all the physical evidence of a murder he committed. The police didn't notice any bruises on Lester. Well, if the town's big industry is letting teenagers buy booze, the police can't be on the competent side. Redneck was able to threaten Lester's mother to not admit what happened. That bit makes sense.

The Scarecrow costume is better than what normally would be expected in this type of movie. If only, the bad one-liners had been removed. Although, a mute ninja scarecrow would be ridiculous. Wait, it couldn't be worse than say any of the cheesy one liners from Freddy Kreuger or Chucky.

Probably, the best part of the movie is Tiffany Shepis. Maybe I was just getting a Rose McGowan vibe from her. Well, that is nothing to complaint about, though. She is at least different than the typical disposal teen girl in these movies. She doesn't fit the cheerleader clique, etc. Though definitely a hot chick, she at least doesn't look like the typical horror girl. Even more, Tiffany Shepis is a far better actress than any of the others in the movie.

I should note this isn't the kind of movie to watch several weeks after Batman Begins. To go from Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow to a pseudo-ninja-scarecrow is quite a letdown.

This movie stole from numerous horror movie endings. Let me see how many. The Pit, Ninja 3: the Domination,one of the Prom Night movies 2 or 3, Urban Legends, and I'm sure a few other movies could come to mind. Judy kills Lester Scarecrow but is somehow possessed by his spirit. The guy in the field hangs around to let the scarecrow kill stoners. You get the feeling a few movie endings too many got tacked onto the end. By the way, I don't think dedicating your movie to Dario Argento is going to impress Asia Argento to let you see any of her tattoos.

Reason to riot


They stole a Bruce Campbell one-liner. Lets see if you can find which one it is.



2 NINJAS

Quotable Dialogue

"You want your cool card, don't you?"
"You want to go to the kitchen. We're gonna play some drinking games."
"Call me daddy."
"Lets find a small animal to torture."
"You weren't taking a trip down memory lane with Mary Jane, were you?"
"Smoking their drugs. Fornicating all hours of the night."
"Can you dig it?"


Morals of the Story

Cheerleaders wear mudflap girl necklaces.
Scarecrows can do ninja flips.
Scarecrows are the only attractions in small rural towns.
Death endows ninja skills upon those that return from the dead.
Cornfields are romantic.
Old men wield shovels like battleaxes.