Charles
Durning , Larry Drake, Jocelyn Brando
Awesome!! Creepy, touching, disturbing, and genuinely scary, Dark
Night of the Scarecrow would have a special place in my heart even
if I hadn’t first seen it as a 6-year-old in Iowa, where I literally
had a cornfield in my backyard (which no doubt made for emotional scarring
that years of booze have yet to correct). This fantastically economical
revenge tale involves the fate of poor Bubba Ritter, a mentally handicapped
man who is best friends with the young Williams girl. When the girl is badly
injured in a dog attack, Bubba is hunted down in the cornfield (where his
mother has instructed him to disguise himself as a scarecrow) by a gang
of men led by the monumentally slimy Charles Durning, the
local postman, who exhibits an unhealthy fixation on the Williams girl’s
friendship with Bubba. The men kill Bubba in cold blood, the girl recovers
to reveal that Bubba had nothing to do with her attack (and indeed saved
her life), and the men get off scot-free with a self-defense plea (they
had planted a pitchfork in Bubba’s cold, dead hands), and it looks
like justice will not be served to the grieving Williams girl and Mrs. Ritter
(Mommie Dearest’s Jocelyn Brando
– “Barbara, please!!”) until a scarecrow starts popping
up in the fields of the killers and offing them one by one. Needless to
say, this is some scary shit, particularly if you live in an area with scarecrows
– but even recent viewing reinforced just how solid the filmmaking
is here: great locations, deliberate camerawork and staging, excellent performances,
and some seriously nasty shocks (a man being dropped into a woodchipper;
the revelation of Durning’s pedophilic tendencies; a surprise accidental
death) keep the mood dark and tense and the action riveting. Robert
Lyons, who plays Skeeter, has the most perfect teeth I’ve
ever seen on a redneck gas station attendant (he also appears in the excellent
Death Car on the Freeway
and 10
to Midnight), but it’s Durning who really bares his fangs
here, turning in an inspired performance as one of the most legitimately
infuriating characters I’ve ever seen – you’ll be begging
for him to get it by the end. |
