Husk

Well, well, well (a rather deep subject but we won't go into that now)  seems that syfy has finally served up a movie on Saturday that didn't completely suck.  Oh, wait a moment.  This is an "After Dark" film.  The After Dark imprint belongs to a series of horror films that all play together in theaters as one big film festival.  It's rather brilliant marketing and has already been copied by others.  The actual quality of each film differs but generally you can always find at least one good one.  Now of course Syfy is its right to buy this film and show it, but they were showing it with commercials touting this to be "I love Syfy month."  This is not one of their films so that's all a little jittery.

Let's leave off corporate ethics for the moment and look at the film.  Now let's see we have a car load of disposable young people (DYPs) on their way to anywhere but here.  They get into an accident and find themselves surrounded by corn.  In the middle of all this is a spooky abandoned house.  They are looking for one their DYPs who disappeared after the crash.  They find him in the house... sewing.  Yes, this film tries mightily hard to make sewing and corn scary.   I  will admit they certainly make it very creepy here at the beginning.  Oh, our DYP is sewing with one hand that has a nail pounded through each finger tip.  At first he just sews but you can't make a movie about that, I mean Norma Rae did that and zombies don't unionize.   So soon all the DYPs are running, and they are dying.  See there are more like that except they are wearing scarecrow costumes.  As they are killed they are reanimated to go back to the sewing room to pound nails in their hand and make up their scarecrow suit.  Can our plucky disposable young people survive?

Well, honestly I didn't care that much.  This is loads better than the usual Syfy film, but really folks isn't that damning with faint praise?  I really didn't care much for any of the characters.  The writing fails at times, specially when it had to resort to "random psychic vision" to fill in the blanks for the audience.  On the other hand, it certainly was creepy and had a strong beginning.  It also wasn't afraid to dumbfound the general expectations of who gets killed next.  So as a horror film I would say it falls strongly in the middle.

My favorite film along these lines is "Scarecrows."  That got uber creepy and twilight zoney rather quickly.  Since all the characters were thieves on the run you knew that anyone of them could die at any time.  It suffered from budget and writing woes, but check it out for B movie fun.

Here is the trailer for Husk:



and here's a german trailer for Scarecrows



and here is siouxsi & the Banshee's song about the a scarecrow