User Reviews

J. D. Feigelson wrote the screenplay for the TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow more than forty years ago and now, it's finally time for a sequel. This time, he both directed and wrote the film, whereas the original was directed by Frank De Felitta (the writer of Z. P. G., Audrey Rose, The Entity, Scissors and more, as well as the director of Killer in the Mirror, Trapped and The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan).

Can it measure up to a film that many see as a true classic?

Chris Rhymer (Amber Wedding) and her young son Jeremy (Aiden Shurr) have recently moved to a small town in Stubblefield County. Their very arrival is a mystery to the close-knit town; after all why would someone move from the big city to their little town and be content to work in a country store?

While Chris tries to build a new life, Jeremy grows closer to the older woman who watches him after school every day named Aunt Hildie (Carol Dines) and also begins speaking to an imaginary friend that he refers to as Bubba. Chris is losing track of everything in her life and finds herself confiding in the worn scarecrow in the field, telling it all the secrets of her life while placing a flower in its lapel, a flower that's returned to her as she sleeps.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Hildie is using Jeremy to reach the spirit hidden within the scarecrow, just as Chris' past comes back with tragic results, as it turns out that Chris was in witness protection and she's been found.

Unfortunately, while the movie attempts to remind us of the first film, it in no way can match it or even add to it. Whereas the original only hinted that perhaps something supernatural was happening, the sequel fully invests in the idea that Bubba is inside the scarecrow. I don't expect that past cast to come back -- most of them died in that film and are also sadly no longer with us -- but I have such a strong feeling and adoration for the original that this feels like an unwanted hanger-on.

I wanted to love this movie. Sadly, it fell quite far from the mark. It may have had a lower budget than the 1981 TV movie, yet that film marks the most of even its lower budget by effective filmmaking and assured direction.

I was super excited to find DNotS had a sequel. That excitement faded pretty fast. Originally Bubba was a gentle soul, wrongfully murdered, but who sticks around to deliver what his beloved and anguished mother termed "other justices in the world than the law". Despite dispensing spooky & clever justice out to the bad guys (falling into a thresher, smothering in a grain silo, running into a pitchfork) Bubba never harms innocent people.

In this film some random woman in the Witness Protection Program moves to Bubba's town. Her kid receives after school care from the elderly cousin of the late Bubba Ritter, called Hilda Mae "Auntie Hildy" Corvis. She teaches the boy songs, and (seemingly) introduces him to a friend (our buddy Bubs), while teaching him creepy crafts like making cornhusk dollies of scarecrows on crosses. What she's actually doing is using the boy as a playmate/friend for the lonely Bubba (remember: even after all this time he's still basically a 6 year old boy) tricking the child into getting Bubba to off anyone anyone she dislikes.

Innocent people die, most for no reason- a farmer get a scythe through the head, a sweet old fellow gets hit by a truck, a young slacker gets torched and burns to death...Bubba's nothing like he was (except he's still leaving flowers about), he's being used and controlled by an evil person, he seems like nothing more than a violent (unimaginative) puppet. I had hoped to at least see a cameo of Bubba's best friend Mary Lee, but nope. This is no sequel, it's a feeble attempt to use the original film name and the character of Bubba Ritter and squeeze a few more bucks out of it decades later. I doubt they got much. Let's just pretend this movie never happened and rewatch the one and only Dark Night of the Scarecrow.

When I heard that one of my favorite cult classics, DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW, had gotten a direct-to-video release, I was very excited, especially since it would be directed by the same person who wrote the original film.

I have now seen the film, and while I have to say that it doesn't quite measure up to the original, it does have something to keep the viewer occupied. The plotline of a woman and her son reluctantly relocating in the area where the events of the 1981 film took place and becoming drawn into mysterious acts of supernatural vengeance does make for a good film. The plotline here seems somewhat more complicated than the original, staying more in gray areas of moral ambiguity rather than of right and wrong, while the original was a straight tale of supernatural vengeance and you could definitely tell who were the villains (I'm very glad that the events of the 1981 film ARE referred to in this film); perhaps this is due to the different directorial styles (the original 1981 film was directed by the noted writer Frank De Felitta, while this film was directed by J. D. Feigelson, who wrote both screenplays). I understand that times and tastes change and 40 years (both in real time and in the films' timeline) have passed and I respect that. Two stories of supernatural vengeance in different time periods but the same avatar of vengeance should be told differently, and this 2022 version does a good job of eventually bringing the different plotlines together for an unexpected climax (the reveal of the REAL villain was one that I never expected!).

Now onto the drawbacks. I was not happy about that while in the original the vengeance scenes took place at night and the person responsible was never shown on camera, in this film some of them take place in broad daylight and there are slight glimpses of the person enacting them. There is a lack (or seeming lack) of a musical score in this sequel (I particularly loved Glenn Paxton's score in the original film). While I don't fault their acting or the screenplay, I don't get the same "life" from the characters of this sequel that I did in the original, but that's just my own feeling. Finally, it seems to me that there is a certain drabness or lack of color in the photography, where the original film had a certain richness of color even at night.

Some people may feel I'm being generous in giving this film 7 stars, but I feel that the strong points of the film outweigh the debits. This film is an acquired taste that may take some people longer to appreciate and enjoy than others.

Besides, to paraphrase Patrick Stewarts' spoken epilogue from the soundtrack of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS: "I'm still rather fond of that scarecrow man", even forty years later.