PLOT SUMMARY: When a new recruit is hired at the Horror Emporium, the owner and former employee try to scare him with horror stories.
If you watch a lot of movies and wonder who keeps cutting off the power or who keeps turning around the signboards to lead hapless victims to their demise from the hands of a demented killer, the answer is the very first shot of the movie.
Scare Package is a tongue-in-cheek anthology of stories that rely on horror tropes. The challenge is in making these stories humorous, but given the concept, it could fall flat and the jokes could come off as unfunny.
SCARE PACKAGE Movie Plot
The movie begins with a man changing the signboards in a way that would lead drivers to an insane asylum instead of a camping site. Mike barely manages to turn the signs around before the car of teenagers appear and are led to the very place they didn’t want to go.
Mike isn’t very happy with his job as just being a character who sets up traps. He wants more than a dialogue to seem like he’s worth something. His friend reminds him he doesn’t have much of a personality and should be content with the job he’s getting. But Mike is insistent on doing something more than what he’s told to do.
One night two teenage girls are babysitting in a house when the lights go off. Mike barely manages that task and stuffs the shears in his Workman clothes.
Later his job is to tap on the window and ask the girls if they are alright considering he’s a concerned neighbor.
The girls think he’s a creep and glad when he walks away. But Mike is done playing by the rules. He tears off a piece of paper that probably contained his one dialogue and begins to chat with the girls, asking them if he could hang out with them.
One of the girls noticed the shears and realize he’s the one who cut off the power.
They let him in but one of them goes upstairs to call the cops and get a knife. The girl who is with Mike makes him confess he cut the power and he explains how he wanted to make the transformation to a main character, but she thinks he’s a creep and tries to attack him with his own shears. She slips and stabs herself on her neck.
While Mike is contemplating whether the safer choice would be to leave the shears in or take them out, the other girl creeps downstairs and is about to stab him when Mike removes the shears and accidentally stabs the other girl as well.
He’s disappointed to learn that the girls didn’t want to hang out with him but kill him.
The police arrive and it is his friend who shoots him on the shoulder because she always misses her shots.
She advises Mike to go away and do something else.
Mike turns to screenwriting and we see his full name is Mike Myers. He’s being dropped off by Chad who runs a Horror Emporium.
While Mike goes off to start a new life, we follow Chad’s story. He fires his employee Sam for having a punchable face and puts up a sign for help.
A short man instantly applies, his name Hawn.
Sam isn’t too pleased with his replacement and decides to loiter in the Emporium as a customer. He also tries to spook Hawn so he can leave and his job position will be vacant again.
He starts off with a story of a group of campers who are excited about their new relationships and the adventure.
They are approached by a man in torn clothes who begs them to kill him or else he will transform and kill them all. He pleads with them to at least handcuff him.
One of the guys immediately fishes out a pair and they restrain him as the stranger begins to transform. He wishes they had gotten him before he transformed but warns them of a killer in the woods. Turns out one of the guys who had offered the handcuffs is the masked killer. He immediately kills his friends and chases after his new girlfriend.
There is blood and slime flying off everywhere. The girlfriend manages to escape the attack and is about to help the stranger who is uncomfortably handcuffed mid-transformation when she is bitten by him. She too begins to transform into a blob of slime and accidentally handcuffs herself to the stranger.
They both wait until they can transform back.
Sam concludes his story but Hawn barely blinks at his attempt to spook him.
He gives Hawn a hard time while he works and then sets about narrating another horror tale.
This time it is about a man in a bar, moping about his fight with his wife. He misunderstands the bartender and thinks he’s being hit on. In the bathroom, he sees a notice for a meeting for men who are henpecked by their wives and need to vent. The group is called M.I.S.T.E.R. as is the segment.
The man attends the meeting and finds a lot of men aggrieved by the silliest things. He is incorporated in the group with another meeting set for the next night.
The man arrives with a duffel bag on a full moon night. He keeps remembering his wife’s taunts about having to do everything.
The other men in the group, one by one turn into werewolves and ask the man to join them.
The man smiles and kills them all one by one. Is he a hunter? Apparently, someone more sinister.
He heads home and his wife is already hosting a dinner party. When he arrives, he announces he’s brought severed werewolves’ heads.
His wife is happy and together they are made to wear black robes. It’s a weird cult where people throw parties and hold rituals over supernatural creatures.
The story ends and Hawn is still not impressed.
Sam insinuates Chad has a secret and doesn’t allow anyone to the back room.
Hawn follows him and finds Chad taking a balloon with him to the secret room. Hawn tries to find out what is going on by opening the door but before he can see what is going on Chad appears and thinks Hawn has already seen what is inside. He opens the door wider and sees its actually a surprise party for Hawn.
After the party, Hawn sees a VHS of another movie Girls Night Out of Body. This segment is about two girls at a grocery store buying snacks. One of them finds an orange skull candy that has a warning sticker near it. In spite of it not being a saleable item, the girl steals it and joins the friend waiting outside in the car.
The three girls are gossiping, listening to music and eating candy. One of them notices a stalker but isn’t sure as he disappears from the window.
Two girls lick the stolen orange skull candy and their faces change into orange skulls. The third girl makes a frantic call to the store but the owner simply laughs reminding them that it was punishment for stealing the forbidden candy.
The third girl decides to join in the fun and licks the lollipop. She too transforms and opens the door to pull in the stalker. He is immediately killed and the three girls resume their sleepover.
The next segment is the cliche we see in pretty much every slasher movie, you know the ones where the killer has inhumane strength and refuses to die no matter what is done with them.
A girl and guy are enjoying an intimate moment when they are interrupted by a killer. But the couple was only faking it. It was a trap set for the killer. The girl uses one technique after another to kill the attacker, but he keeps resurrecting. He even kills her friends one by one, all of them typical characters.
The guy friends who are in love with the protagonist, and the chirpy best friend, and the nerd who secretly loves the girl.
Eventually, when the serial killer is unmasked, the girl shows emotion which the nerd questions if she’s into him. The girl collects herself to blow the killer off with fireworks and even electrocute him. But the killer lives on even after going through a chipper.
The next segment has a guy being marked with an omega sign and killed. There’s a woman in a car talking to her friend about how much she hates spoilers of a show she’s hooked on. The guy who was just killed returns as a ghost and possesses her. He drives home and turns on the TV to the very show the woman is hooked on. She emerges and fights the guy, reminding him over and over there is no way she’s going to watch that show and see all the spoilers.
The show hardly looks interesting enough for such an overreaction from two people. One who came back from the dead to finish watching the show, and another who isn’t freaked out that she’s being possessed, but rather that she is being made to watch spoilers.
She triumphs in the end and is later followed by the same two men who killed the man.
Apparently, they don’t want people to finish watching the show. Are they supposed to be the show’s producers? Did the show not turn out the way they expected and now want to kill the fans rather than disappoint them?
This didn’t make any sense and was perhaps the silliest part of the movie.
SCARE PACKAGE Ending Explained with spoilers!
The final segment has Chad waking up in a room with cliched characters that includes a jock, a stoner, and two girls, one of them tomboyish.
Chad realizes he was kidnapped by Hawn who wants to conduct scientific experiments on him to find out how he would fare if a horror creature was after all these characters.
Everyone knows the final girl theory and so Chad tries to follow the tomboyish girl and buddies up with the stoner guy.
Meanwhile, Hawn’s experiment has gone awry because the horror creature has escaped and killing everyone in the facility.
Chad uses his knowledge of horror movies to figure out which character is a safe bet to be around. However, he miscalculates who the final girl is and is almost attacked by the creature when Joe Bob Briggs turns up, a veteran in horror movies. Chad thinks he will save them all, except the creature rips him apart. Chad takes Joe’s hat, believing him to be the next great hero. He’s killed in seconds.
There is one girl left and though injured, she neatly rips off her sleeves so that her dress becomes sleeveless, a norm for every final girl. They have to end up in sleeveless tops. She and the stoner try to leave in a car they find but remember the rule of the engine not starting until they are 14 meters away from the monster.
They also remember the story of how the creature came to be and how disappointed he was that the cancer kid he was helping died. The stoner shaves off his head and uses himself as bait to lure the monster. The girl knocks out the monster and then the stoner pushes the monster away 14 meters so their car can start. But just as it does, the monster awakens and kills the stoner.
The girl drives away and reaches an open field where she dreams about being attacked by the monster. But like every cliche, she awakens and is attacked by the real creature. She dodges his attacks and for some reason, the petrol has dropped out leaving a trail.
The girl runs into Mike, still wandering about and dying to play the main character. He is happy to learn he’s with the final girl and runs away with her while the car blows up in the background.
The movie had a lot of fun moments, but not every segment was entertaining. The stories with the girls and the lollipop, and the woman who didn’t want any spoilers to her favorite show, were just plain silly without being funny.
The rest of the stories were cleverly written to include the general theme of the movie which was to exaggerate and make fun of the usual horror tropes. The unnecessary twists at the end, the victim who seems innocent but isn’t, and the hero who comes to save the day but isn’t really the hero.
Except for the two stories mentioned above, the movie is quite entertaining.
Scare scale: 3/5
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