The Gist: A town full of assholes do vigilante justice on an innocent man and end up getting killed through Final Destination-style accidents, while controlling their paranoia.

Anyone Famous In It? Charles Durning as Hazelrigg, the towns only mailman. Larry Drake as Bubba, a mentally challenge adult male. Lane Smith (he was the prosecutor guy in My Cousin Vinny) as Harless, a farmer. And this may depend on how well you know your early ‘80s nighttime soap operas, but Tonya Crowe, who was Olivia on Knots Landing, as Marylee Williams, the town’s only kid.

How I Watched It: DVD

So, What Happened? Bubba, a very much grown man with the mentality of a little kid, is friends with Marylee. They’re playing in a field, gathering flowers and getting along just fine. You know who doesn’t approve of this? Well, mostly everyone in this town, but especially the only mailman in this town, Hazelrigg. Hazelrigg also seem to run the post office and I get this is a very small town but at least have TWO USPS workers, one in the post office, and one out delivering mail. Also, Hazelrigg only owns one set of clothing: his postal worker uniform. He is never seen wearing anything else. I suspect the guy who wrote this HATED the post office and was like “See? Mailmen are fucking assholes!”

Actually, everyone in this town are assholes but I’ll get to that. For whatever reason, Hazelrigg REALLY dislikes Bubba and has a five minute conversation with Harless about how Bubba might snap and kill the girl because his mental capacity wouldn’t know better. Other people nearby, including Philby a guy who runs a grain mill and Skeeter a mechanic, join in and say “YEAH!!! BIG GIANT DUMB GUY IS A MENANCE!!!”

As if on cue, Marylee and Bubba are walking through town and Marylee trespasses onto someone’s property while Bubba laughs and a giant dog quite literally comes out of the void and attacks Marylee. Bubba panics, knowing he’s going to get blamed, drops the girl off at her home before running home to his mama.

Mama does a Bad Ronald (A late ‘70s made-for-TV film about a kid who accidently kills a girl, goes and tells his mom and she does everything to protect her sweet innocent boy) and tell Bubba to go disguise himself as a scarecrow out in the field. When news about the girl gets to the town, they immediately form a posse, arm themselves with guns, and decide to kill Bubba.

Mama tries to threaten them with a trespassing warning but they have guns which makes me wonder why Mama doesn’t have a gun, especially if this happens all the fucking time. I mean I’m guessing this happens all the fucking time, to the point where they have a system to go hide as the scarecrow anytime the town decides to go after Bubba.

Which makes me wonder what he possibly did the other times?
“Mama, I forgot to pay for my meal at the diner and now they’re coming after me!”
“Mama, I threw a ball in the air and it landed in Mrs. Johnson’s yard!”
“Mama, I voted for Jimmy Carter in the election instead of Ronald Reagan!”
Sigh “Get in the scarecrow, Bubba!”

This time the town is out for blood, goes into the field and Hazelrigg spots the scarecrow is blinking and they immediately shoot him. And it wasn’t just one shot. No! These assholes shoot him like 800 times! AND THEN the reason they did this was because they thought Marylee was dead but no, they hear over a CB radio that not only was the girl alive, but she was alive BECAUSE of Bubba.

Instead of going “oops”, Hazelrigg puts a pitchfork in the dead arms of Bubba and said they shot him a bazillion times out of self defense. Now you think there would be fingerprints and probably cause and all that but NOPE!! This is a small ass town! Hazelrigg is a mailman, the most respected position in this town! Everyone is going to believe him!!!

The D.A doesn’t have evidence to back up the pitchfork was planted (DNA?!? FINGERPRINTS?!?! UGH THE ‘80s amirite?!?) and the judge (who is probably everyone’s drinking buddy) lets the four men go. Bubba’s Mama is furious and declares there’s “other ways to get justice!! OTHER WAYS!!!” and the four men celebrate by eating fried chicken at the local bar! We know this cause Skeeter repeats the words “FRIED CHICKEN” three times in between bouts of laughing.

Marylee wakes up from her dog attack (with not a scratch on her) and goes looking for Bubba by breaking into Mama’s house. I want to stress at this point that this was a made-for-TV movie and they had to fill TWO HOURS (cause commercials) so there’s a LOT of scenes of people just wandering or having super long conversations or just staring in some cases. So here, we’re treated to Marylee just slowly walking around Mama’s house until she runs into Mama, asks where’s Bubba, Mama not knowing what to say and finally come up with “he’s gone”. Marylee says “OH! I Know how to find him!”

She goes to the scarecrow stand where Bubba died in the field, sings a song, and plants a flower. Then says “This will bring him back!”

Then the movie sort of turns into Final Destination. We see the four men doing their jobs and three of them are very dangerous. Harless throws wood into a woodchipper. Philby fills a silo up to the top with grain. Skeeter smashes his hand on an engine block. And Hazelrigg…delivers mail and looks at other people’s nudie magazines.

Everyone in this town seems to be one form of asshole or another, with everyone happy the four men got away with murdering a mentally handicap guy. But I need to stress that Hazelrigg is like the KING OF THE ASSHOLES! He lives in a boarding house, he doesn’t care about anybody else, he constantly drinks even though someone else mentions that he’s not suppose to. This never got mentioned earlier nor comes up again, I don’t know why that person said he’s not suppose to. Maybe it’s a gag on the whole “mailmen shouldn’t be drinking” even if their off duty? Are mailmen held up to a higher standard in this town? Should Hazelrigg run for mayor?

A question you are probably asking is are there any law enforcement in this town? Or is it just vigilante justice? The answer: Yes and yes. We see a deputy in two scenes and that’s about it. Otherwise it’s “Billy Smith forced himself on Susie Hanson, get the shotgun!” Also did I mention this was a made-for-TV movies and things are a bit slow?

It’s about 45 minutes into the movie when we get our first “an eye for an eye” death when Harless first noticed a scarecrow in his field that he doesn’t know how it got there then after panicking, hears a weird noise in his barn, climbs to the top, and falls into the woodchipper, which seemed to turn on on it’s own.

Everyone rules Harless’ death an accident but Hazelrigg starts to suspect murder…by Mama!! He sneaks into Mama’s house later that night, covers her mouth, and says “you stop murdering my friends that I can’t fucking stand, you hear?” before he discovers she died from either a heart attack or being suffocated by his hands. He then rigs her gas oven to explode so another “accident” happens.

So that’s like 3 weird deaths in the past week. Sheriff? Deputy? Nope. Just accidents. I’m surprised a town meeting wasn’t called and a presentation was shown on how not to be so damn clumsy. Actually, considering the town, I’m surprised there wasn’t a town meeting scene at all.

They heavily imply in several scenes that Hazelrigg seems to “have a thing” for Marylee, who I will again stress is a LITTLE GIRL. Not even a teenage girl, a LITTLE GIRL. We get a too uncomfortably long scene where Hazelrigg traps the girl in a hallway and keeps talking about how pretty she is and that Bubba’s death was an accident and don’t believe the town lies!!

Which leads us to Philby’s death. I accurately predicted how Harless was going to die and I was also correct in how Philby died. He sees a scarecrow in his field, freaks out, hears a noise, and runs into his silo, which gets locked. Then the grain starts falling into the silo, immediately trapping and killing him. This SHOULDN’T have been ruled an accident cause how do you accidently lock yourself in a silo, turn on a grain sorting machine FROM THE OUTSIDE, and then stand there for the 2+ hours it would take to cover a grown man in grain in order to kill him. If anything, should be ruled a suicide then a homicide. But nope. Accident. It was weird, you guys!

Skeeter hears about Philby’s death and knows he’s going to be next and I looked forward to how he was going to be killed via a car or in the garage shop. Lots of different options! A engine falls on him! He gets locked in while a car is running! He gets run over!! He gets his dick stuck in the tailpipe! SOMETHING! But no. INSTEAD, Skeeter runs to Hazelrigg freaking the fuck out and insisting that Bubba isn’t really dead. To calm him down, Hazelrigg takes Skeeter to Bubba’s grave.

They dig it up, look in the coffin, see his rotting corpse, and Skeeter SUPER freaks out, saying his spirit is killing them all!! Skeeter wants to go to the police and confess they planted the pitchfork in Bubba’s hand and Hazelrigg says “Yeah! Let’s do that! But first, go back into the grave while I stand up here holding this shovel! OOPS! I accidently hit you in the head! Oh well, may as well cover your unconscious body with this dirt. Oh dang, I accidentally buried you alive! Clumsy me!”

In other words, such a boring way for Skeeter to die. Then I wondered how Hazelrigg was going to die via his post office job. Get a nasty papercut? The Unabomber? Driving into a ditch while drunk? Nope. He gets chased by a thrashing machine!! That turned on by itself! And it chases him through a field of hallow prop pumpkins! Somewhere, a young Billy Corgan was inspired. Hazelrigg eventually runs into a scarecrow that popped out of nowhere and was holding a pitchfork, which stabbed the shit out of him. Hazelrigg points a finger at the scarecrow and then promptly dies. Again, justified but still a bit disappointed. And with that, our CBS Movie of the Week comes to an end.

Final Thoughts: This movie was bizarre. Watching an hour and a half of a town full of assholes cause the death of a mentally challenged man and then die through mysterious circumstances and being labelled as “accidents” was a strange thing to experience. And we get no shots of the scarecrow walking around or causing deaths or anything. All the machinery that was used to kill them just turned on all on its own, then turned off all on its own. We do get a creeptastic shot of the scarecrow looking down at the little girl in the final scene but that’s about it. Also it being a made-for-TV movie wasn’t doing it any favors as you don’t see any of the deaths or even the corpse in the coffin (I assumed in was rotting) and there’s just so much filler. I kinda still wanna recommend it but be patient with it. And go in knowing that only three people in the entire movie are not assholes and start rooting for everyone’s death pretty quickly.

Rating: 2 and a half out of 5.