Scarecrows

Scarecrows (1988), directed by William Wesley, Shout! Factory remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including 5.1 remaster, two commentary tracks, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096046/

Video encoded in two-pass 11.0 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image. Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available.

Subtitles converted to SRT.

Note : Here's a little known oddity, an 80s super-independent horror film that's a decidedly mixed bag, with a bare-bones story, performances that range from over the top to just hysterically bad, and kind of a slow pace, but it's also pretty tight and suspensful, has creepy creatures, very nice cinematography, and some good gore. It's also notable since several of the people whose first feature this was went on to have long careers, DP Peter Deming shot Evil Dead II, Scream 2, 3, & 4, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Drag Me To Hell, and The Cabin in the Woods, while producer Cami Winikoff later worked on films in the Return of the Living Dead, Leprechaun, Warlock and The Dentist series. Anyway, this is a good one if you want a short, nasty little supernatural stalk-and-kill film that doesn't outstay its welcome, and also features the only zombie with huge nightvision goggles I've ever seen.

A group of mercenaries, who seem to have all been come out of some random character generator that gives each one a specific quirk, so one plays the harmonica, another is always chomping on a cigar, one plays with a pair of dice, etc., steal three million dollars from an army base and hijack a plane to get away. On the way, one of their own double-crosses them and parachutes out of the plane with the money, forcing the others to land nearby to try to get it back. What they didn't count on was that the money is now smack in the middle of a cursed farmstead haunted by demonic scarecrows that kill people, stuff them with straw (or dollar bills) and resurrect them as zombies, and/or use their bodyparts to replace their own rotting limbs. Fortunately, the mercenaries are heavily armed. Unfortunately, they're kind of dumb.

This is not a new remaster by a long shot, but it looks fine, if a bit dark and slightly fuzzy. 5.1 track is ok, both commentary tracks are decent enough, all in all an acceptable transfer.

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