Day Fourteen - Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)

    Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a television movie starring Charles Durning as the world's biggest asshole postal worker who, along with some of his douchebag buddies, carries out some vigilante justice on a retarded man (Larry Drake) they suspect of killing a little girl. Unfortunately, the tard actually saved the little girl and then hid in the field disguised as a scarecrow where the bastards shot him in cold blood. What follows is a network television slasher movie about the ghostly scarecrow exacting its revenge on the murderous mailman and his chums. This is a pretty cool, if not altogether original, premise for a horror movie, and Larry Drake has the perfect eyes that mix sympathy and creepy behind the scarecrow mask. This made me nostalgic for those days when I was growing up and the major networks produced relatively high-quality films specifically for television. Real actors in entertaining stories that weren't afraid to frighten and hint at risque topics (pedophilia, yipes!). Sure, it's not Casablanca, but Night of the Scarecrow is entertaining and maybe the one film I wouldn't mind seeing remade. It's a creepy premise that could really deliver the goods with a little tweaking and some R-rated gore.