This season he takes his final bounty...
...And pray to God that neither he nor this series ever comes back!
In 1921, a voodoo-practicing witch stuffs a scarecrow with a brain, heart, and possibly other organs. The James brothers and their gang of moonlighters decide to take over the witch's territory and kill her in front of the scarecrow. As we may be able to assume from the back cover and un-dramatic flashbacks throughout the film, the scarecrow then goes on a brutal rampage and butchers the entire gang. The farm then peacefully gets passed down generation to generation within the James clan.
Fast-forward to 1981. A group of friends (who don't at all act like friends) is getting together for their yearly "hangout", a tradition they've maintained since high school (I'm going to assume these people didn't go to college) in order to keep in touch. This year, the "protagonist" Brett James (Clay Brocker) has decided that the group will spend the weekend at the aforementioned farm. And thus the dubiously similar setup to Dark Harvest (I) leads to the action...
Admittedly, the third installment boasts a few improvements over the first two films. Though the shoddy camerawork ranks somewhere between the absolute nadir seen in "The Maize" and that of the original, the "special effects" are grossly improved over the first two. The scarecrow killer is convincing enough as a horror-movie monster, and though certain scenes (such as one in which a victim is being "disemboweled" and she is clearly wearing a cardboard box full of organs that only vaguely look like human viscera under her shirt) are laughably bad, the effects are on the whole believable.
The direction is also superior to the crapfest work we saw in the first two films; the atmosphere is much more suspenseful (keep in mind, though, that on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most suspenseful, this still ranks in at a solid 1).
Unfortunately, the "few" improvements mentioned above end here. Only one of the actors are competent (the blind preacher) - one even smiles while she is supposedly having a seizure/blackout! The dialogue, and indeed the whole plot, is woefully full of holes. For example, a man barges into the cabin to tell the others that his (Wife? Girlfriend?) has been taken by the scarecrow; a minute later, at the scene of the crime, he says "Where did the body go!? It was just here!!!" In another instance, a man declares that he and another person go look for a missing woman. Two seconds later, he and the person begin discussing escaping the farm. A detective that falls prey to the James brothers at the outset of the film earns the award of being the worst actor of all time, managing to not show emotion as he is ambushed and taken hostage by the group of thugs.
The final conclusion? This movie is the best of the trilogy, which makes it only the third worst movie of all time. If you've watched the first two and are interested in this, you obviously either have a flair for the morbid (in this sense, for morbidly bad movies, not for horror) or actually enjoyed them. In either case, this turd installment will definitely sate your palate. If you haven't dabbled in the steaming pile of feces that is the "Dark Harvest" series, don't start. Turn, walk away, and never look back.
