Anthology horror films have a surprisingly long legacy, with the first one, Unheimliche Geschichten, being traced back to 1919. Arguably, Dead of Night from 1945 popularised the genre before the boom in the 60s and 70s, the latter of which had its own Dead of Night that went direct to television. Television has been the mainstay home for notable anthology horror, though even these got film versions with The Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1983 and Tales from the Darkside: The Movie in 1990. It has retained some popularity up to today with the ongoing V/H/S series and now has a new addition, Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge.
Only two years after the first Scare Package was released on Shudder, its sequel receives a similar release though it also received a preview at this year’s Frightfest. With fewer films and a shorter running time, there’s a sense that this sequel is trying to refine what it did previously. It makes the slightly odd move of being a direct sequel and beginning with the final girl from Scare Package attending the funeral of Rad Chad Buckley, the video store owner who (spoiler) was killed in the previous film. The ceremony soon turns into an elaborate series of death traps centred around Chad’s favourite films, with the guests having to survive using the clues from the movies Rad has posthumously provided for them.
The general rule with anthology movies is that the wraparound story needs to be as solid as the segments: Tales from the Hood is a good example while Tales from the Hood 2 is a less good one. With fewer films, this time around, the Rad Chad’s Revenge storyline takes up the bulk of the running time which, as you can guess from the plot summary, is effectively a drawn-out Saw parody with inexplicable returns of previously killed characters and nonsensical puzzles. In theory, this is a solid concept with the Saw series’ many melodramatic twists and turns, in terms of plot and what is done to Jigsaw’s victims, ripe for parody. Unfortunately, the humour is used to justify the random and incomprehensible puzzles the guests have to solve, and worst of all is strikingly unfunny beyond one trap referencing The Wicker Man remake. That scene from The Wicker Man remake. The one that people stopped making fun of years ago. Still funny though.
The accompanying short films largely reflect this tone, carried over from the first film, of being explicitly meta and self-aware in their parodies, to mixed results. ‘Welcome to the 90’s,’ directed by Alexandra Barreto, is set on New Years’ Eve 1989 at the divided sorority houses of the Final Girls and the STDs (Sure To Die). It lightly pokes fun at the tropes of final girls with a neat commentary on its evolution in the latter twenty-first century as final girls Laurie, Nancy, Sally, Jenny and Ellen reckon with the arrival of an unexpected STD called Buffy.
It’s overuse of slo-mo and knowingly self-aware humour grated with me in a similar way to the genre of movies it is more clearly moulded on than traditional anthology horror: the Scary Movie franchise.
Final girls are also the subject of ‘The Night He Came Back Again Part VI – The Night She Came Back,’ a sequel to the short in the previous Scare Package directed by Anthony Cousins. Set twenty years after that short, it is a subtle parody of requels like Halloween (2018) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) with the final girl older and dealing with the trauma of being a final girl. At least, it’s subtle in its set-up but it doesn’t actually tackle these sorts of films, which is particularly unfortunate when Scream (2022) has recently covered this same ground. Instead, it’s content to carry on being a mock Halloween set on the 4th of July with a genuinely freaky final image that is worth waiting for.
The clear outlier amongst the shorts is ‘Special Edition’ directed by Jed Shepherd which reunites the cast of Zoom horror hit Host as they reckon with a strange creature that seems to be haunting a videotape. By far the most complex short in terms of story and form, it is as playful as the rest of Scare Package II but decidedly moodier. Whether it’s just the British sensibilities or because of its more serious tone, it stands out among the parodies that surround it and feels like it’s from a completely different sort of anthology, for better and for worse.
The final short, ‘We’re So Dead’, is directed by Rachele Wiggins but written by Aaron B. Koontz and Cameron Burns, the writers of the Rad Chad storyline. The similarities are clear as it riffs on Re-Animator and Stephen King, to the point that this becomes a plot point in the Rad Chad story. Simply having this story set in Australia is enough to give it a different flavour and the kids clearly relish acting in this twisted story. It may all be set up for a punchline that is literally the final line but it’s charming enough.
As you may have gathered, I’m not entirely enthusiastic about this film but I’m also aware that the first film has its fans, so I’m willing to write this up as its sense of humour simply not gelling with mine. It’s overuse of slo-mo and knowingly self-aware humour grated with me in a similar way to the genre of movies it is more clearly moulded on than traditional anthology horror: the Scary Movie franchise. Like those movies, the filmmakers proudly show off their film knowledge with references to Hellraiser, [REC], and Nightmare on Elm Street, leading to the sort of reference humour that made the Wayans so successful. I’m not hard-hearted enough to criticise anyone’s sense of humour, but in terms of my experience, it was aptly (and unfortunately) summed up by the villain of the film: “I’m getting kind of bored and I really fucking hate you so I can’t wait to see you all dead.”
SCARE PACKAGE II: RAD CHAD’S REVENGE IS STREAMING ON SHUDDER FROM 22ND DECEMBER
