Dark Night of the Scarecrow

Dark Night of the Scarecrow is basically The Ox-Bow Incident meets And Then There Were None with the addition of one creepy scarecrow. When a small town simpleton named Bubba (played "full retard" by the future Dr. Giggles, Larry Drake) is falsely accused of killing a small girl, he is subsequently chased and murdered by a gang of good ol' boys, lead by the local postman (and implied pedophile) Otis, played by Charles Durning. After the good ol' boys escape punishment from the law for their crime, they begin to get killed off, one by one, by a sinister scarecrow. Dark Night is a decent thriller that is very much of its time. Also, being that was made for television, it doesn't feature much in the way of gore. When it's suggested that there are movies that could never be made "in this day and age" I think of movies like this. It's hard to imagine a new movie coming out wherein a mentally disabled protagonist is murdered by a vigilante group. Only for said vigilantes to be killed themselves by the supernatural manifestation of the wrongly accused. Sure, some schlock meister could trot out a low budget version of the story, but I can't imagine it would be something that a major network would pay for and promote.

Rating: 66%

(Image from Amazon)