It's times like these I really regret MST3K is no longer on the air.

Early this morning, in one of those whimsical "you're up, it's on cable" moods, I gave a low-budget slasher-horror film called Scarecrow Gone Wild a try. Oh, my god. Honesty dictates I should tell you I was not exactly expecting great things from a B-movie called Scarecrow Gone Wild, but still: Oh, my god.

This thing is below-MST3K caliber all the way. The acting seems nonexistent, but (bending over backwards to be fair to a young cast) it is impossible to tell if the actors could ever be any good, because: The direction is incompetent and the script...no, I refuse to believe there was a script. The dialogue makes Kevin Smith sound like Noel Coward.

Here's the scrap of plot: A college hazing victim merges with the soul of a murderous scarcrow and kills the kids who did this to him, on the beach. But put all that aside. It is the most plainly homoerotic slasher-horror film I've seen since at least the Jeepers Creepers movies, and maybe since the infamous Nightmare on Elm St Pt. 2.

First of all, the actor...and I use the word loosely...who was cast to play the role of the victim turned homicidal maniac is a young man with the fake-sounding name of Caleb Roehrig. Obviously I am not privy to Mr. Roehrig's sexual orientation, but I can say that he comes off about as straight as the love child of Liberace and Scott Thompson's Buddy Cole character from The Kids in the Hall.

This wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except that this immidiately noticable "vibe" means whether intentionally or not (I'd guess not), early scenes in which there's talk of setting his character up with a girl can only be greeted with hoots of derision. He, and/or his character, is clearly a gay man. Remember that, it may be important.

And then there's the good ole' boys he spends the rest of the film putting to sleep (much like the audience, ba-da-boom). Most of these fellows seem to spend inordinate amounts of time holding one another, considering their characters are supposed to be straight. And despite the presence of one or two really rather cute girls.

One of whom, a young woman named Tara Platt, has a part that consists almost wholly of sleeping with her friend's boyfriend, going topless and being killed off. Who says there are no good roles for women any more?

But my point in bringing this up is, even on the most base level of providing pleasant eye-candy for a straight male and/or lesbian audience, this film fails.

Not because Platt is anything less than lovely to look at, she's quite beautiful. But this film seems to have been made mainly on cold, cold days. I'm not making a cheap nipple joke, I'm picturing a director screaming "I don't care about your frostbitten toes, I'm losing the light!"

The scenes of Platt's exposed, pale skin and her bikini-clad form walking into an icy-looking sea do not inspire thoughts of the "hubba-hubba" variety. It's more like will someone for god's sakes get that girl a blanket and some hot chocolate and sit her down by the fire?

There's actually one or two good web sites devoted to looking at horror movies from a queer perspective (my favorite is Camp Blood-get it, get, huh?). I think such a film dramatizing the alienation many if not most young gay men must feel if surrounded by homophobic straight frat-boys could-potentially-be great.

That's the obvious subtext here. But what moves this film from the merely poor to the jaw-droppingly, inexplicably, irresponsibly bad is this: The hazing of the kid who's going to come back and get them, get them all, consists of his being stripped, beaten and left tied to a scarecrow all night.

And then it stops being funny. Because you realize that the filmmakers moral compass is so skewed they're willing to invoke the real-life horror of Matthew Shephard as the inciting incident for their stalker flick. But not willing to come out and say that's what their crappy movie is about.

And that makes Scarecrow Gone Wild not just a bad film, but an actually evil one.