Directed by William Wesley in 1988, Scarecrows takes a bit too long for its own good to really find its stride, but once it does it pays off nicely. The story begins when a quintet of criminals made up of Roxanne (Kristina Sanborn), Corbin (Ted Vernon), Curry (Michael Simms), Jack (Richard Vidan) and Bert (B.J. Turner) successfully pull off a daring payroll heist. With a few million dollars in cash now theirs, they make their escape by high jacking a plane piloted by a man named Al (David Campbell) and his daughter Kellie (Victoria Christian) forcing them to fly the gang into Mexico where they hope to make a clean getaway.

Plans change when Bert decides he wants all of the loot for himself. He distracts everyone by attempting to blow up the plane and then hops out with the cash and a parachute. He lands safely in a cornfield near an old farmhouse where he hopes to find a getaway car, completely ignoring all of the creepy scarecrows around him. Curry, Jack, and Corbin head out after him while Roxanne gets Al to land and holds Kellie hostage to ensure he waits for this to be resolved. They don't want their getaway plane taking off without them. As the various parties start patrolling the area, all involved start to realize that there's something very off about all of this. The old farmhouse might not be as abandoned as it looks and those scarecrows out in the field are starting to move.

As mentioned, the setup here is a bit overdone but once we get into the cornfield and the scarecrows begin to do their thing the movie really takes off. The film benefits a lot from some great atmosphere brought about by the excellent location photography and eerie nighttime setting. The scarecrows themselves, brought to life by way of Norm Cabrera's excellent special effects work, tend to steal the show here. They're genuinely eerie to look at and once they start popping up and laying waste to anyone the deem fit, they make for some pretty great movie monsters. It's a shame then that the human characters aren't as interesting. Each one of the five main criminal types is a cliché of some sort and it's hard to warm to them making it in turn hard to care about what happens to them.

Disposable lead characters aside, the movie still offers up plenty of fun in its second half. The film hits a nice balance between horror and action, bringing to mind similar movies like Predator and Dog Soldiers albeit with much cooler, creepier monsters. This makes it easy to forgive some of the logic gaps and dopey character actions and reactions that are littered throughout the movie. As the characters try to figure out what is happening to them and why they theorize about their situation and without wanting to spoil it, there is one particularly goofy theory tossed out, which the characters don't really even bat an eye at.

Though hardly what you'd call a splatter fest the movie definitely earns its R-rating not just for the tough guy language you'd expect from a group of paramilitary criminal types, but for its liberal use of gore. The kill scenes are pretty creative here and when they occur they can and do get pretty grisly. Add to these really effective scenes some slick cinematograpy courtesy of Peter Deming that always ensures that the movie looks its best and a surprisingly old fashioned but no less effective instrumental score from composer Terry Plumeri and, if not a modern horror classic, Scarecrows does turn out to be a decent slice of low budget horror well worth seeking out.

Video:

Scarecrows arrives on Blu-ray framed at 1.85.1 widescreen in AVC encoded 1080p high definition. A whole lot of this movie takes place outside and at night so this isn't the brightest, most colorful looking movie you're ever going to see. Having said that, the transfer here looks pretty good. Black levels are strong and shadow detail is actually pretty decent. There aren't any obvious compression artifacts and the picture stays clean and free of any major print damage. Grain is present, as it should be, but never overpowering and skin tones look good. Detail varies a bit from scene to scene though that looks to have more to do with the photography than the transfer. For the most part, however, detail and texture are quite good.