As ye sow, so shall ye reap.In
an agricultural community in the deep rural South, mentally challenged
36-year-old Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake) enjoys spending time with Marylee
(Tonya Crowe), which arouses the ire of bullying redneck mailman Otis
Hazelrigg (Charles Durning). The mailman harbors unsavory interest in
the young girl (she's around nine years old), so he stirs up three of
his friends by convincing them that sweet and harmless Bubba is likely
to do something unspeakable to Marylee. It's made clear that the quartet
make sport of regularly tormenting Bubba, but things reach critical
mass when Bubba and Marylee investigate the new fountain that a neighbor
has installed in their backyard. Marylee tries to convince Bubba to
sneak into the yard with her, but, fearing that he would get into
trouble, Bubba demurs. Once in the backyard, Marylee is attacked by the
owner's big dog, and though mauled, Otis saves her and brings her to her
mother's door. When the child is brought to the doctor, it's a small
town, so news travels fast, regardless of the information's accuracy,
and it is assumed that Bubba did something unspeakable to Marylee, so
while the sheriff calls for volunteers to find Bubba, Otis gathers his
loutish friends and the four embark on a mission of vigilante "justice,"
equipped with bloodhounds and armed to the teeth. A terrified Bubba
flees to his home, where he lives with his aged mother, who reminds him
of "the hiding game." Bubba knows the hiding game and he's good at it,
so when the posse arrives, Mama Ritter tells the vigilantes that he's
not there (which is technically true). The dogs, however, pick up
Bubba's scent, which leads them to a scarecrow in the middle of a field.
Baffled at first, the posse soon realizes that Bubba has hidden inside
the scarecrow and, led by Otis, they blast the shit out of poor bubba,
shooting him twenty-one times.
Moments
after ventilating the innocent man-child, one of the rednecks receives a
CB call telling him that the search for Bubba has been called off and
that Marylee is alright, thanks to Bubba saving her life. The four are
tried for the murder, but the prosecution's evidence is nil, so the four
walk. Bubba's distraught mother loses it in the courtroom, and as she's
being hauled out by the bailiffs, she more or less curses the murderers
by ominously stating "You may think that you're getting off free, but
there's other justice in this world!!!" The shameless murderers
celebrate getting off scot free, and they celebrate with beers at the
local bar before resume their lives as normal.
A
few weeks go by and Marylee is home from the hospital, but she is
depressed and wonders where Bubba is. No one informed her of the murder,
and her parents, who only just realized the deep and genuine connection
she had with her cruelly executed friend, opt not to tell her about it.
The girl learns of Bubba's death from his mother, but she refuses to
believe he's gone, noting that he must be playing the hiding game. But
things get weird when the scarecrow that Bubba hid inside begins
appearing in broad daylight in the fields of two of the murderers, so
ringleader Otis is convinced that someone knows what they did and that
that person is trying to rattle them. Suspicion initially falls upon the
prosecutor, who vowed to nail them if he could find so much as a shred
of evidence, but Otis's sights soon fall on Bubba's mum.
As
two of the rednecks meet gruesome "accidental" deaths (wood chipper and
burial under tons of grain in a silo), Marylee also falls under Otis's
suspicious scrutiny, and when he confronts her to find out of Bubba's
mother told him anything, she states she knows that he killed Bubba,
because Bubba told her. This spooks the hell out of Otis, so he returns
to Bubba's mother to intimdate her but accidentally kills her in the
process, so he blows up her corpse and her house by igniting a staged
gas leak. Otis and the remaining redneck dig up Bubba's grave to make
sure he's dead, and from there things escalate to a final reckoning for
Otis, who chases Marylee through a pumpkin patch in the middle of the
night, with a reveal of exactly who is exacting revenge at the climax.
After
hearing about it for over forty years, I finally saw DARK NIGHT OF THE
SCARECROW (1981). I was really into made-for-TV exploitation and horror
offering during my growing up years, but I missed this one because it
aired during one of my Saturday night shifts at the local movie theater.
When we returned to school the following Monday, my peers who saw it
raved about it, so, unlike with several other touchstone made-for-TV
efforts whose daring and/or scary attributes that we all bonded over in
mutual kindertrauma, I felt left out. But now I have seen it and I'm
glad to say it's a solid little entry-level shocker. As it was made for
television, it features no gore, nudity, or profanity, and only the most
minimal of blood, so this would get a mild PG if submitted to the MPAA,
but its tale of supernatural retribution is quite tense,and I could
easily see it scaring the shit out of any under-10's who watched it. And
the killer remains intriguingly ambiguous until the last moments, with a
final reveal thankfully does not cop out. Available on Youtube.
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