Sharknado.  Ghostquake.  Ice Twisters.  Piranhaconda.  Sand Sharks.  Sharktopus.  Dinocroc vs. Supergator.  Mansquito.  Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon.  Ghost Shark.

One thing about all of those films you can say, aside from them all being SyFy original movies, is that they have a little bit of originality going for them.  Even if all these films do is just string two words together to create something new.  And being made on the cheap.  And being fairly terrible.  But good in their badness.  Scarecrow is nothing like those films.

The movie takes place in WhoCares, RandomState with the annual Scarecrow Festival about to take place.  A couple of silly kids are trespassing in a barn where they should not be, they cause an accident and wake up an ancient scarecrow-like monster.  Up until this point, everyone thought it was just an urban legend.  Too bad for the kids who get killed and fed upon by the creature.  Enter some more kids and their teacher and Lacey Chabert who also end up at said farm and start to get killed off one by one.  It seems that the scarecrow was not a legend and had actually been buried long ago by Chabert’s grandfather up until this point and now it wants to feast on her specifically.  Bad for her it seems.

The film is actually a little okay, despite being a rehash of every scary creature movie from 1980 and onward.  Sure, it is tedious and a little boring and will probably have very little to offer the horror veteran, especially being a made for television movie.  But it does have something, something that keeps you watching even when you really do not want to any longer.

The film stars Lacey Chabert and she is the best part of the film by far and has come a long way from those Party of Five and Mean Girls days of yore.  She is still quite beautiful and has actual talent, so why she would choose to star in this is a little strange, not that it is a terrible film.  Surprisingly, it has some really decent effects and a decent script.  The scarecrow creature looks really good for a television film and it does not feel like a SyFy movie at all.  There are better horror films out there, and this is nowhere near as bad as some, but it is simply put, average.

Could it have been better?  Of course it could have.  They could have hired some more recognizable stars to act alongside her and invested a bit more into everything, but for what it was, it was actually… a little… fun.  This is not Friday the 13th, or Darkness Falls or Jeepers Creepers, nor is it Sharknado or Mansquito, but it does fall somewhere in-between.  Not great, not terrible, just on the upside of mediocre.  It is good enough to keep you engaged for an hour and twenty minutes or so, but it is not a movie you will ever watch again unless you are watching cable one night and happen across it.

3 out of 5