In “Scare Package,” Chad Buckley is a lonely Horror aficionado, spending his days overseeing a struggling video store and arguing with his only customer, Sam. When an unsuspecting job applicant arrives, Chad sets out to teach him the rules of Horror; weaving in and out of hilarious segments geared toward the ropes and tropes of terror.
“Scare Package” has been promoted as a homage to the horror films of the 1980s but in reality, it is nothing of the sort. It is amateurish at best, with the occasional glimmer of inspiration but in the end, it amounts to nothing more than a group of horror aficionados getting together to produce an anthology of short films that they assume would have been successful in the 1980s. Although that decade produced some pretty cheesy horror movies, the titles in “Scare Package” are, without a doubt, inept at best, succumbing to preposterous and nonsensical narratives filled with unrealistic and exaggerated characters. Even though it is a parody of horror films, it never once achieves its goal of scaring you or making you laugh, and with a horror-comedy, you would expect to accomplish at least one of those objectives.
The movie begins with Chad (Jeremy King), a struggling video store owner looking to hire someone to help him run his business. When he hires Hawn (Hawn Tran), Sam (Byron Brown), Chad’s only customer, swears vengeance as he claims to be a movie enthusiast who knows everything about films and would be perfect for the position. He tries daily to scare Hawn into quitting his job by telling him horror stories of local legends and folklore and these segue into short films filled with witches, monsters, and demons. Occasionally, Hawn picks up a title in the store, and Sam, who has nothing better to do than hang around all day, begins to explain the premise of the movie, and we then cut to the visual description he is outlining to Hawn and this becomes the precedent for the remainder of the film. The one aspect throughout that had any chance of redeeming this atrocity, is when the archetypal characters who appear in horror movies, the jock, the virgin, the token black guy, the final girl, all decide they are fed up with going through the exact same routine in every scary film they appear in and when they try to change things up, they are killed off. It is the only spark of imagination but even its execution is poorly conceived and orchestrated.
I always try to find some redeeming quality in every review I write, but I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this title. A 10-year-old could pick up a camera for the very first time and make a far more interesting film than “Scare Package.” Even the inclusion of Joe Bob Briggs is not enough to salvage this movie and that is pretty sad. If you want a good horror parody, watch “Shaun of the Dead” or “Scary Movie” instead, I guarantee you, with either one of those titles, you will at least laugh.
Available on Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, & Digital HD October 20th
