Scarecrow and Mr. Rollins
Having been raised on a farm John Rollins (Norman Reedus) thought he could handle his own farm and with his wife and children take over a small place. But things don't go as planned as debts mount up, he can get no more credit and the crows are destroying his crops. In a moment of anger in the barn he pulls down an internal wall and finds an old, creepy looking scarecrow stashed behind it. With his young son pleading with him to destroy it his neighbour Jude Weatherby (Richard Riehle) shows up and convinces him that he should hang it in the field. And it seems to do the job as things start to change for John but has given himself another, much bigger problem to contend with.
You should never ignore a movie when you see that it is the 2nd movie in a franchise because it doesn't always mean it is a sequel. That is the case of "Messengers 2: The Scarecrow" because this is a prequel and as such can be watched with out having seen "The Messengers" from 2007. It was how I came to see "Messengers 2" having not seen "The Messengers" so can't compare but I can say that this prequel is only a middle of road horror movie serving up a series of events which you are likely to have come across before in other horror movies.
So what we get in "Messengers 2: The Scarecrow" is this scarecrow which when John puts up in his field various things start to happen one of which is that John seems to be delusional seeing a woman getting naked by the side of his field as she washes herself in the spray of the irrigation system, which coincidentally hadn't been working. We also get him getting a little too rough with his wife in the bedroom as he gets horny. But we also get the killings as suddenly people die such as the banker who is trying to foreclose on John in order to sell the land to someone else privately. The thing is that none of it is breathtakingly original and pretty much every horror scene ends up familiar as we see John descend in to a state of paranoia.
In fairness being familiar is not a bad thing and director Martin Barnewitz does an efficient job of working through all the familiar stuff, trying to give it some style whilst also keeping it ticking over. But to make this level of familiarity stand out fro m the crowd everything has to be right and sadly everything isn't right it is just about okay. The acting is okay but forgettable, the moments of horror are okay but they don't make you recoil and so on and so forth.
What this all boils down to is that "Messengers 2: The Scarecrow" is just an okay horror, a second movie which thanks to being a prequel can be watched having never seen the first movie. But it isn't anything special and the sort of movie that shortly after watching you will have forgotten about.
