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| Chabert completes negotiations for her Hallmark contract |
Watched: 04/19/2025
Format: Tubi
Viewing: First
Director: Sheldon Wilson
A movie with a pretty good idea behind it, this movie has an okay first half hour or so and then throws away all of that goodwill in the bin by becoming a movie where things keep happening, but nothing really resolves itself. And I can't tell if that's intentional - like a joke on the part of the writers - or laziness or sheer incompetence.
It's not even clear, based on what we saw before, that ten seconds after the credits role, that our Final Girl isn't going to get killed.
What's most weird is that the description of the film on IMDB - from the producers, I'd guess - is not what actually happens in the movie. There's elements of that, but that's not really what happens. I almost feel like this was a description of the script at some point but then they made a different movie through rewrites.
A group of high schoolers is going to spend their day of Saturday Detention (ala The Breakfast Club) on a farm "disassembling" the famed scarecrow from the old Miller farm that's part of the town's annual Scarecrow Festival. But the movie opens on two horny teens sneaking onto the farm first, planning to spook their pals when they arrive, and getting killed by our monster.
The town has an annual Scarecrow Festival during which they have some game where they ritualistically "bury" the Scarecrow. But it's essentially a small-town fall fest, I guess. We never see it.
The movie takes great pains to establish characters as we progress. A couple who are irascible a-holes, a shy and geeky artist, jock, troubled girl, other (nicer) troubled girl, teacher who wishes he was the guy from Glee who is running this operation. Chabert shows up as the owner of the farm who has returned to her small town to sell the farm because she failed in the big city? Doing what, I don't know. But she and teacher have a rocky history of romance, and she's clearly putting her feelers out to see if he'll take her back after they broke up back in high school. After all, he's, as she says "a big time teacher". I have no idea what this phrase means.
What's weirdest is that they then introduce what seems like it's set to be big tension because Chabert invites her OTHER ex-boyfriend to "help", knowing these two dudes have bad blood, specifically about Chabert. So, Chabert is just a shit-stirrer. The second boyfriend is played by Carlo Marks, who has been terrible in some Hallmark movies, but is actually good here. I don't understand.
NONE OF THIS MATTERS.
They're at the farm for about five minutes before the "Scarecrow" starts picking off students. Just absolutely massacring them. That's all that matters. They just jump right into it.
There's a suggestion that Chabert has a rich backstory and we'll be exploring that and how it's tied to the horrors unfolding, but... not really. We eventually get a few pieces of exposition that Chabert's great grandpa "buried" the Scarecrow one-hundred years ago, but no one says how it was unburied. No one says what the Scarecrow is or what it wants. Someone says it wants Chabert, but there is literally no evidence to suggest this is true.
No one's backstory plays into anything. People just get murdered as they run in circles.
The monster is a sort of CGI Swamp Thing monster, which is one of the few highlights of the movie. It's a cool idea. The monster keeps forming out of vegetation. It's not good CGI, but I liked the idea. In fact, if this movie were $7 million instead of $2 million, I'd be curious what they could have done. Also, with rewrites. But the monster is neat.
So, it's about 70 minutes of slog as we finally get to the point where Chabert is the Final Girl.
Is it stupid?
Yeah. I mean, it's a SyFy channel horror movie. It's basically every Pumpkinhead-type movie you've ever sat through.
A while back I was genuinely beginning to question this whole exercise of watching every movie (I can find, which is live action) in which Chabert appears. What was the point? Well, exiting the Hallmark-o-sphere and seeing what the hell else she's been up to is becoming the study of a "working actor".
Chabert had been a working actor from her earliest days. It's what she does. And clearly the Hallmark thing is a huge boon to her career. You can roll your eyes or sneer at Hallmark, but that's steady work for her. And probably been lucrative. And she isn't being chased by CGI plant monsters. After a stint in big-time movies like Mean Girls, for whatever reason, she was not selected by Hollywood to be the next big thing. So, nine years after Gretchen Weiners, as Scarecrow airs, she's not quite become the Queen of Hallmark, either. We're in the period where she's doing *everything*. She's done some Hallmark, some studio work, but she's also doing SyFy flicks. She's in thrillers no one saw. This is not a sign she will soon be telling you what candle holders are the most festive.
I don't know what her selection process was for projects - maybe saying "yes" to whatever came across her desk and hoping she'd land on her feet. And, she did.
That a decade later, she bounced from doing this to being so valuable to Hallmark, she signed a much-publicized exclusive contract with the network, got her own production deal and line of Chabert-approved-goods at Hallmark Stores is kind of remarkable. And one of the most watched movies of 2024 was her supposedly "very bad" Christmas movie, Hot Frosty, on Netflix.*
In the middle of this very dumb horror movie, that really needed an R-Rating and more effects, Chabert is actually not bad. She clearly knew what he backstory is and was working with it. And if she wasn't anchoring this movie, I'm not really sure what would have happened with this movie.
Anyway, we're well out of Hallmark-land and in the unknown territories of Chabert's career, so expect further musings.
*I'll argue most of the people complaining about it did not understand the joke or why casting Chabert was key to really making it all work
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