Victoria Christian | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee and several other services!

This week, season 2 comes to an end!

Episode 2.24 “Friends”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on May 7th, 1986)

Jonathan and Mark have a new assignment. They’re going to be working as substitute teachers.

“I don’t want to be a teacher!” Mark says.

It’s actually kind of interesting that Mark is never happy with any of the assignments that he and Jonathan are given. It seems like almost every assignment involves making him do something that he doesn’t want to do and also humiliating him in the process. In this episode, Mark not only has to be a teacher but he ends up teaching Sex Education. We don’t actually see Mark teaching the class. In fact, Mark is actually barely in this episode. But we certainly do hear Mark complaining about having to do it.

This episode finds Jonathan reaching out to two troubled students. Jack Mason (Darren Dalton) is only going to school because he likes playing on the baseball team and he’d like to win the state championship before his senior year ends. Otherwise, Jack doesn’t care about his grades or even graduating. He tells Jonathan that his father dropped out of school and he’s doing just fine. Jack even suggests that he personally might drop out as soon as baseball season ends.

(Jack is apparently a good baseball player but he never mentions any desire to play professionally. That would truly make him unique amongst high school jocks. It would also suggest that Jack is realistic enough to realize how difficult it is to make it as a professional athlete. Jonathan gives Jack a hard time about his attitude but Jack might be smarter than he seems.)

Because Jack is failing Algebra, Jonathan arranges for Jack to have a tutor. Jonathan selects Jenny Bates (Judy Carmen) for the job. Jenny is a lonely girl who is good at Algebra and insecure about being overweight. She desperately just wants to have a friend but hardly anyone at the school is willing to talk to her. Will she be able to help Jack improve his grades? Will Jack finally realize that his father is struggling due to his lack of a high school diploma? Will Jack’s bitchy girlfriend (Alexandra Powers) invite Judy to a party just so she can trick Judy into putting on a bathing suit so that she can be humiliated in front of everyone? Will the episode end with Jack on the way to graduating and Judy finally having made a friend? This is Highway to Heaven so I think you know the answer to all those questions.

“If I can pass Algebra,” Jack tells Judy, ‘you can lose weight!”

Now, that’s definitely not something that you would hear on a network television program today. Not in today’s age of body positivity. That said, let’s be honest. Being overweight is not necessarily healthy and, just as no one should be ridiculed for being on the heavy side, no one should be shamed for trying to lose weight if that’s what they want (or need) to do.

This episode was a bit on the predictable side, but that’s actually one of the things that people tend to like about shows like Highway to Heaven. Judy Carmen gave a poignant performance as Jenny. Darren Dalton played Jack as being a bit of an arrogant knucklehead and that made all of the scenes in which Jonathan yelled at him feel extremely satisfying. (I should note that I recently rewatched the original Red Dawn so I spent this entire episode thinking about how Dalton betrayed The Wolverines to the Russians.) This episode featured Jonathan at his most stern and it was an interesting change-of-pace from the gentle technique that Jonathan usually uses during his missions.

With this episode, the second season ends. It was a good season, overall. The show can be corny and a bit mawkish but it’s all so earnest and sincere that it’s often impossible not to be somewhat moved by it. Next week, we start season three!

The 1988 film Scarecrows is one that has a very simple but also very effective premise.

Scarecrows are scary as Hell.

And you know what? There’s a lot to be said for the premise. Seriously, I have no problem with clowns but scarecrows definitely make me nervous. It’s the way that they’re just left out there in the middle of a field, tied to a post and seemingly staring at the world through black eyes. I know that some people try to make scarecrows less creepy by giving them smiles but, to me, a smiling scarecrow is even creepier than a scarecrow with no expression at all. At night, whenever you see the shadow of a scarecrow in the distance, it’s always easy to imagine it climbing off of its post and walking towards your house, its dark eyes focusing on your bedroom window the whole way. If you’re not scared of scarecrows, you’re not paying attention.

(Of course, perhaps the scariest thing about scarecrows is that crows don’t seem to be particularly scared of them. I mean, if the crows have figured out that they’re not human, what’s the point of having them unless you’re going to use them to summon evil spirits?)

Scarecrows opens with a daring heist. Five paramilitary mercenaries, people who are paid to fight and kill for a living, steal three million dollars from Camp Pendleton and then force pilot Al (David James Campbell) and his teenager daughter, Kellie (Victoria Christian), to fly them to Mexico. However, in the middle of the flight, one of the merceneries grabs the money and a parachute and jumps from the plane. Two other mercenaries jump after him while the remaining two force Al to land the airplane. The plane ends up landing outside of a small farm, one that appears to be deserted except for all the scarecrows….

Now, seriously, think about this. The majority of the characters in this film are mercenaries. They’ve been trained in every form of combat. They’ve got weapons and they know how to use them. They are used to fighting and, in fact, they even look forward to it. Not only are they mercenaries but they’ve also just successfully robbed a MARINE base. You don’t mess with the Marines unless you’re very stupid or very confident or maybe both. Adam Driver was a Marine. Do you want Adam Driver mad at you? My point is that these characters are not your run-of-the-mill horror movie victims.

And yet, one-by-one, they’re taken out by the scarecrows. We get a bit of backstory about the scarecrows when the mercenaries stumble across a farmhouse and discover that it was owned by three Satanists who transferred their souls into the scarecrows. But really, that’s not important. What is important is that the scarecrows will emerge from the darkness and kill anyone who lets their guard down. The scarecrows even talk to each other! TALKING SCARECROWS! AGCK!

Anyway, Scarecrows is an effective, quickly-paced, and atmospheric horror film, one that I really enjoyed when I watched it last October. The scarecrows make for efficient and frightening monsters. This is the film that proves that scarecrows are scarier than clowns.

Seriously, don’t mess with the scarecrow.