Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

Undeniable and undesirable, all good things must come to an end. Time takes and death upends the glorious and great. 2016 took many from us. That year took Angus Scrimm. This film gives him a proper sendoff. Okay, so many have and will continue to balk about that previous sentence.  I think it does. Scrimm became Legend with the career character that is The Tall Man, a Boogeyman conjured, we first thought, from the tormented psyche of a young man who lost his brother in a car wreck. Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) experiences adventures with his brother, Jody (Bill Thornbury), and together they encounter The Tall Man and his robed minions, small-sized bodies of those who have died, miniaturized at Morningside Funeral Home, many of them barreled and shipped off to the another red world, found once entered through a dimensional gateway between two poles. Introduced was Lady in Lavender (Kathy Lester), a female disguise or figment of The Tall Man, a knife ready to stab once she sed...

“Mercy, showeth thee not.” Tis how I feltith while I watcheth this messeth. In the mid 2000s, 2003-2009 or so, there was a return of sorts to the gore film. Low budget films were splattering blood and body parts all over the place again and folks were dying in awful ways. 2005 was right around the time when the boom of Hostel, the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and the Euro-horror Extreme movement was coming into full blossom. Olaf Ittenbach was making the likes of Dard Divorce and Permutos right around this time, a German gore auteur, staking his own claim in the land of grue, offering his own meat train of zombie mayhem with “House of Blood” (also known as Chain Reaction), from 2006. It involves a doctor with a run of inexplicable bad luck, never unable to escape a series of Dept of Corrections prisoner van wrecks which involve him in one way or another. The first, he’s just driving and the van collides head on with him thanks in part to a dead bird and rock. The second, he’...

First Season. It was fun. The finale of course went off the deep end as slashers often do, with this ridiculously elaborate set up that gets the final killer off because she's the smartest, most cunning, and slippery girl in the Kappa House. There's another killer who also involved in getting his hands bloody, as the Red Devil costume can be a disguise for anyone to use if needed. Boone, Rodger and/or Dodger, Gigi, Taylor Swift fangirl, Sam, Candle nut, Earl Grey, Caufield, and the Dean's husband: just some to head off the mortal coil with Red Devil so often to blame. Even the first student mascot to wear the Red Devil and Ice Cream Coney disguise just happened to be shit outta luck. And don't even get me started on the poor pizza delivery guy who paints the sorority house red when the final killer straps a bomb to him, with a timer rigged to explode! Coming out of Scream Queens, what I certainly consider either be appealing or disapproved is its exaggerated s...

Once again, I didn't realize I had already written for an episode of Twilight Zone, having put myself through the writing process and then noticing a review already on my IMDb account. Classic early TZ time travel episode from the great Richard Matheson holds your attention due to its emergence of the past landing in the present, with events affecting time frames. A WWI British pilot from 1917, during the Blitz, inexplicably lands in 1959 at a US Air Force base in France, not quite understanding exactly how. Lt Decker (Kenneth Haigh), later admitting he is a coward who left his pilot partner, “Ole Leadbottom”, to battle surrounding German planes, is considered by those on the base—General George Harper (Alexander Scourby) and Major Wilson (Simon Scott)—questioning him as having flipped his lid. What they will soon learn, once Decker decides he must return from whence he came and make sure his pilot comrade receives the assistance he deserves, is that as inconceivable as a tr...