Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge

Scare Package II (2022) is a movie that I recently watched on Shudder. The storyline follows a horror guru who dies and sets up a series of horror games for his guests to observe and/or survive, Saw style. Will any of his guests survive the games or are they all destined for a demise similar to his own?

This movie is made up of several segments codirected by Alexandra Barreto (Mayans MC), Aaron B. Koontz (The Pale Door) among others. This picture stars Jeremy King (As Night Falls), Shakira Ja'nai Paye (House Party), Byron Brown (Blood Fest), Dustin Rhodes (WWE), Barbara Bingham (Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) and Diana Prince (Halloween Ends).

It's too bad this is a parody because the special effects and gore in this are out of this world. I really enjoyed the kills scenes. Like every film made up of several segments, some are better than others and some take themselves more seriously than others. The killers are consistently pretty cool with good makeup, masks and overall design. The comedic content was inconsistent with some scenes more clever than others. The acting will remind you of the Scary Movie franchise, essentially "good enough." The sets are absolutely incredible, like a horror movie play land, very well done. The dialogue can be annoying, but the concepts are consistently worthwhile.

Overall, this is a fun parody that's worth watching once. It isn't Scary Movie, but it's good in its own way. I would score this a 5.5-6/10 and recommend seeing it once.

Alright, well I had no clue as to what I was getting myself into here, as I sat down to watch the 2022 horror comedy "Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge", but I must admit that I was initially lured in by the movie's cover/poster, as it had a very distinct 1980s horror feel to it. I had never actually heard about this movie prior to stumbling upon it.

What a dumpster fire this turned out to be. There simply was no narrative to the movie, and it was just a massive heap of chaotic and randomly filmed scenes that made little or no coherent sense when put together to make a movie. So I am rather amazed with the fact that seven writers could collectively managed to come together to churn out something as ridiculous as what "Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge" turned out to be.

Sure, the acting performances in "Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge" were actually fair enough, but I have to admit that I didn't care one bit for the characters in the movie, well, technically in the random segments filmed and edited into the mockery of a movie.

I haven't even seen or heard of the 2019 "Scare Package" movie, but after sitting through 65 minutes of the 98 minutes that "Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge" ran for, I can honestly say that I am not even going to bother tracking down the 2019 movie. Nor am I am going to attempt to finish watching this 2022 travesty of a horror comedy.

My rating of "Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge" lands on a two out of ten stars.

Back in 2019, Aaron B. Koontz and Cameron Burns' Scare Package was a sly prank on the horror genre. It was a refreshing anthology series that riffed on all of the genre's tropes in clever and fun ways. The sequel, Rad Chad's Revenge, offers much of the same fun but much of the enjoyment is ruined by the filmmakers' constant need to push their repeatitive personal agendas over entertainment or blood-curdling good laughs.

The framing narrative this time is a spoof of the Saw series with a deceased horror guru and video store owner Rad Chad turning his funeral into a series of daunting, deadly escape rooms for the mourners in attendance.

Of the stories presented only two are fairly well done. The first, Welcome to the 90s, has several famous horror final girls and 'Buffy' (Steph Barkley) fending off Jason, Freddy, Xenomorph, Michael Myers, Leatherface stand-in: Tony the Killer (Joshua Miller). Although it is dragged down with a lot of ham-fisted, patronizing editorial commentary which it could have and should have done without, Welcome to the 90s is the best of the four stories. The second featurette, The Night He Came Back Again! Part VI: The Night She Came Back, is a sequel to The Night He Came Back Again! Part IV: The Final Kill in the original film with final girl Daisy (Chelsey Grant) making her return.

If you shut off Scare Package 2 after that one, you won't have missed anything much. If do you venture further put on that football helmet or hard hat you have sitting around as the filmmakers continue to hammer home their agenda over and over again like Thor bludgeoning the ice giants with Mjölnir. That's ultimately why what could have been a good follow-up just becomes as irritating as Love and Thunder. Okay, nothing in filmdom could be THAT annoying but Scare Package 2 gives it a run for its money.

As someone who very much enjoyed Scare Package and thought it was a fun slice of irreverent horror parody with sparks of genius and truly funny gags, this is painful. I was incredibly excited today to see this drop on Shuder and had no idea it was even coming. I started it up and was almost immediately hit in the face with humor as subtle as a hammer. The setup for the first vignette is great, but then quickly devolves into super meta takedown on final girl tropes. This is done in the most hamfisted way possible with it ending in a literal lecture. The subject has been broached by several great films, but this one just falls so flat. The rest of this wretched sequel is just one scene after another of basement quality parody and terrible humor that constantly fails to deliver even a small smile. The jokes here are as witty as the ones in terrible parodies like Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie and all that other similar trash. This is honestly the worst horror sequel since Feast 3 and is so bad, it even makes me question my take on the first film. I suggest staying far away from this one.

The first "Scare Package" was a fun riff on horror films (most of them being good) for the horror nerds by horror nerds. "Part II" is ... somehow ... a cash grab (can't imagine much) pandering to how women are strong, independent, don't-need-a-man, ball kickers and men are alpha males who make the wrong decision every time or are fat goofy slobs.

Much like putting the "F" word in titles of movies, "Part II" sets you up for what to expect from it. It's slow, boring, lazy and badly written by people who either don't care about the genre or just were told to write a story in 30 pages or less without being proofread.

There's nothing wrong with a female lead (there's millions of films dedicated to this, there's entire sections of streaming apps to prove this), but it's becoming a negative trend when literally every movie is doing this and when a movie that is a series of vignettes does this.

There are some great gross out gags and some funny one liners, though.