Dark Night of the Scarecrow 4K 1981 Ultra HD 2160p

In a small country town, developmentally-disabled Bubba Ritter has the mentality of a child and is the best friend of a young local girl. When the girl trespasses into the yard of a house and is attacked by a vicious dog, Bubba saves her but is wrongly accused of killing her by her mother. The postman, Otis P. Hazelrigg, who has a virulent hatred of Bubba, recruits three other vigilante friends of his and after tracking him to an empty cornfield (where he had been hiding in plain view disguised as a scarecrow) the four execute the unarmed Bubba. After learning that Bubba was in fact innocent of attacking the girl, Hazelrigg makes it look as though Bubba had intended to attack them. The four men are brought to trial, but are declared not guilty and are are immediately released. However, justice comes from beyond the grave, and after being mysteriously visited by the vision of a scarecrow, they are mysteriously killed one by one. leaving Hazelrigg (who is desperately trying to figure out who is behind the killings) to the very last.

User Review

Mentally challenged Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake, who played Durant in ‘The Dark Man’) is unjustly accused of causing serious bodily harm to a little girl. Hiding from justice, the guy can't think of anything better than to pretend to be a scarecrow. But the lawman (Charles Durning) sees through this trick and, together with his buddies, cold-bloodedly shoots the guy. Some time passes, and the people who had a hand in this begin to die.
It's a shame. It's a shame that the potential inherent in the film was not fully realized. It is quite possible that if this film had been made for the cinema rather than for TV, and if more money, talent, and soul had been put into it, it could have turned out to be a cult horror film. But it didn't work out. Since there are lots of women and children watching TV, the blood in the film was kept to a minimum. The murders are shown as follows:

Violent ones - just before the murder is shown, the camera carefully turns away and invites us to examine the surrounding walls or ceilings while the victims scream in the background;

Non-violent ones - the camera shows us death up close, but this death is usually bloodless (for example, from suffocation).

The script leaves a lot of questions unanswered - for example, how does a postal worker take justice into his own hands in the city? Why did they only find out that the girl was not killed by Bubba after he was killed? Why is Doring's character so despicable that you want him to be the first to be gutted? I don't have answers to all these questions.

If they had allocated more money to the film and sent it to theatres, if they had patched up the script and included some really brutal murders, we would have ended up with a good film. As it is, it's a dull example of TV production, where there's more talking than action, and even when there is action, it's not very exciting.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (59.9 Mb/s)
Resolution: 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.33:1

Info Audio

#English: FLAC 1.0
#English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
#French: Dolby TrueHD 5.1

Info Subtitles