Horror can actually be an iconoclastic style. What different sort of movie has so many meta spoofs of itself, from Scream and Cabin within the Woods to Scary Movie and The Final Girls? What different style has so many dang sequels, or makes use of the anthology format a lot? What different style has such a faithful fan base that they do not must depend on pre-existing mental property or large budgets to get butts in seats? All of this stuff apply to the brand new movie Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge, an anthology horror sequel to a meta spoof of the style itself.
Like the primary Scare Package, the Shudder unique film from creators Aaron B. Koontz and Cameron Burns tends to desire laughs to scares, although there may be sufficient grotesque, hilariously over-the-top gore to fulfill horror hounds. This is basically a comedy film concerning the horror style, and although it attracts from the plots of decidedly disturbing motion pictures like Saw, The Ring, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, it does so with tongue firmly in cheek — not less than till the tongue is pulled out with pliers and positioned right into a blender.
Rad Chad’s Revenge Is an Actual Horror Sequel
Most anthology movies have a framing gadget, a wraparound story that encompasses all of the brief movies inside it. Sometimes, this barely quantities to something, like in one other current Shudder movie, V/H/S/99; different instances, as in Southbound, it may be crucially essential and cleverly interwoven into the movies. Scare Package II has one of many extra elaborate and stable framing gadgets of any anthology and appears to make up extra runtime than the 4 brief horror movies put collectively. For a horror anthology, this framing gadget is surprisingly deliberate as a sequel. Viewers who have not seen the primary Scare Package can nonetheless get pleasure from this film, however a few of its humor (and all of its ending) will in all probability be misplaced on them.
Drawing loosely from the Saw motion pictures, Koontz’s wraparound finds a gaggle of mourners gathered on the titular Rad Chad’s funeral. Chad, chances are you’ll recall, was punched via the face within the first Scare Package, and some of the identical characters from the unique attend the service for the deceased video retailer clerk. Before they understand it, nevertheless, the funeral attendants are gassed. They awaken to search out themselves trapped and stricken by a Jigsaw-like determine, pressured to play alongside to a lethal recreation the place they discover hints in a few of Chad’s favourite horror motion pictures. The viewers watches alongside, and can hopefully get many extra film references than this doomed assortment of friends.
Koontz’s narrative body for the anthologized shorts is such an extended, well-cast, bloody blast that it threatens to overwhelm the brief movies. Scare Package II works inversely from the everyday guidelines of anthology movies — as an alternative of the wraparound feeling like a uninteresting, compulsory gadget that distracts from the brief movies, the small horror spoofs on this film really feel like a distraction from the primary narrative. In the top, that is in all probability factor, as the primary Saw spoof truly advantages from these little breaks within the motion, by no means changing into repetitive or predictable because of this. It’s in the end capable of grow to be an truly good sequel to the primary movie.
Scare Package Welcomes You to the ’90s
There are solely 4 brief movies in Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge, however they’re all very totally different from each other whereas nonetheless remaining cohesive. That’s as a result of, although they’ve totally different writers and administrators, plenty of the crew stays the identical all through (and Alex Cuervo’s constant rating stays glorious over the course of the movie).
While the primary Scare Package playfully satirized ’70s and ’80s horror motion pictures, this sequel takes an fascinating, nearly extra mental method with its brief movies. As the film progresses, the shorts appear to have fun the aesthetics and deconstruct the clichés of the horror style because it developed previous the Eighties. The appropriately titled first brief, Welcome to the ’90s, indicators this.
Written and directed by the actress Alexandra Barreto (The Fosters, Mayans M.C., All American), the movie delights within the main shifts to horror all through the ’90s. Two sorority homes stand aspect by aspect — the ultimate women, and the useless women. The remaining women all observe the trope set forth by movies like Halloween, the place the chaste, conservative lady survives, and the 4 younger ladies who dwell there are fittingly named after well-known remaining women. However, the serial killer would not appear to care about their chastity, nor does he particularly wish to kill one of many widespread, extra trendy women on the different home (named Buffy, in fact). It’s a humorous set-up that permits Welcome to the ’90s to be nearly anthropological in its exploration of horror characters and the way the values and tropes of the style made main modifications in that decade.
The Anthology Horror Films Come Full Circle
The subsequent brief movie, The Night He Came Back Again! Part VI: The Night She Came Back, is itself a sequel to one of many anthology segments within the first Scare Package, titled The Night He Came Back Again! Part IV: The Final Kill. Anthony Cousins and John Karsko’s movie takes the meta-comedy to the subsequent degree right here whereas parodying the sorry state of horror franchises within the ’90s, when properties like Halloween and Friday the thirteenth have been muddying their canonical storylines and leaping the proverbial shark with all kinds of ridiculous premises. The section with a foe who refuses to die primarily distills all of the insanity of late entries in franchises, the place writers have been greedy at straws.
Next up is the brief movie Special Edition, written and directed by Jed Shepherd (who wrote the unbelievable film Host). Special Edition faucets right into a horror development of the late ’90s and 2000s, the place movies like Pulse, One Missed Call, Feardotcom, and The Ring have been mining burgeoning applied sciences for pure terror. With its mixture of quiet however escalating quiet dread and unnerving imagery, Special Edition really does really feel just like the type of J-horror motion pictures from that interval, and because of this, might be essentially the most genuinely spooky section in Scare Package 2. In it, a gaggle of women is haunted by the shadow of a boy in a picture.
The brief movie We’re So Dead (from Rachele Wiggins) is the ultimate section in Scare Package 2. In a bizarre little bit of round logic that one way or the other is sensible, the movie displays the favored ’80s nostalgia growth which contaminated horror and sci-fi within the 2010s, because of titles like Stranger Things, The Guest, and IT. The brief movie, which seems like a wedding between The Sandlot and Re-Animator, follows a gang of children who stumble throughout a physique in a really Stand By Me approach, after which attempt to resurrect it from the useless with disastrous outcomes. There’s a type of unhappy poetry to the truth that, in chronicling the evolution of horror after the ’80s, Scare Package II finally ends up the place it begins, with the style overcome by nostalgia for the previous.
Scare Package II Is Shudder’s Parody of Horror Sequels
Like the primary movie, the finale of Scare Package II drops the anthology format altogether and simply does its personal factor for a surprisingly very long time. This is the place information of the primary film is useful, because the callbacks, characters, and narrative all profit from prior information. It’s a goofy, gory finish to the sport, the place excessive slasher violence meets slapstick comedy to usually hilarious impact, all whereas organising a possible third Scare Package.
Scare Package II does precisely what it units out to do — lovingly satirize the ridiculousness of horror sequels in a collection of blood-soaked goofs and spoofs. In order to take action, it clearly must be cheesy, schlocky, and unbelievable. Like all good parodies, it should grow to be the factor it mocks. If you are a horror lover, that is an excellent factor.
From Paper Street Pictures, Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge is now out there on Shudder.