Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!
This week, Micki and Ryan visit the country and battle a killer scarecrow! Yikes!
Episode 1.11 “Scarecrow”
(Dir by William Fruet, originally aired on February 1st, 1988)
While Jack is off in Europe searching for a cursed antique, Micki and Ryan head into the country. They’ve recently received a letter from someone requesting that they come to a small rural town and collect the scarecrow that was bought from their shop years ago.
Seriously, do people usually buy scarecrows from antique shops? I mean, I always thought that half the fun of having a scarecrow was getting to build it yourself. And even if you didn’t want to build your own scarecrow, I imagine that you would probably go to a country store to buy one as opposed to heading into the city and going to an antique store.
No matter, though. Even if it doesn’t make much sense to buy a scarecrow from an antique store, the scarecrow is undeniably scary. Of course, when Micki and Ryan arrive in the town, the farmer who bought the scarecrow lies and says that someone set it on fire three years ago. However, the viewer knows that the scarecrow not only still exists but that it comes to life at night and kills people with a scythe! Every harvest, the scarecrow beheads three people and, as a result, the owner of the scarecrow has a good crop while everyone else in the town is struggling to make ends meet.
The viewer also knows that the villain of the story is Marge Lonacre (Patricia Phillips), the rather severe-looking owner of the town’s only inn. Even if the episode didn’t show us Marge activating the scarecrow early on, it would be easy to guess that she is the villain because everything about Marge — from the way she dresses to the way she glares at people to the abrupt way that she speaks — screams villainy. Oddly enough, it takes Micki and Ryan forever to figure out that Marge is the villain, even though they’re staying in Marge’s inn and Micki witnesses the scarecrow depositing a dead body on Marge’s front porch. In fact, for some reason, Micki gets into her head that the helpful sheriff (Steve Pernie) is the killer and she even locks him in a closet so that he can’t keep her from running back to the inn. Ryan and Micki are both likable and Micki’s fashion sense is to die for but, without Jack around to guide them, neither of them is a particularly effective investigator.
While searching for the scarecrow, Ryan bonds with the son of one of the scarecrow’s victims, which leads to some nicely-acted moments from John D. LeMay. I mention this because Friday the 13th, much like Nightmare Café, was always at its best when it explored the humanity of its lead characters. For all of the violence that Micki and Ryan have witnessed, they’re still trying to make the world a better and nicer place and it’s hard not to admire that.
This was an effective episode, one of that was full of creepy atmosphere and which featured one truly scary scarecrow. I think even Jason Voorhees would have avoided this country town!
Through the Shattered Lens 