Scare for the Chop
Marcos (Ian Meadows) and his right hand woman Emma (Meegan Warner) are the team behind TV prank show which for 5 years has dominated the prank TV market. But now their dominance is threatened by a new web based scare show which takes things to a new violent extreme which makes "Scare Campaign" look like children's entertainment. With the season finale to shoot and maybe the end of the show Marcus and his team decide to step things up with the mother of all pranks. Trouble is that Rohan (Josh Quong Tart) turns out to be the wrong guy you want to prank as he once worked in the abandoned children's hospital.
"Scare Campaign" is a surprisingly effective horror movie but one which is built on different layers of surprise and as such I can't reveal too much, frustrating isn't it. But it seems relatively simple as we have a prank show which goes wrong as the guy they are pranking turns out to be a psycho. Or is he? Because of the set up which sees the rival scare show you are constantly wondering whether all is as it seems and maybe the stooge is not the stooge. I won't say how this plays out but it really does do a pretty good job of keeping you watching especially as it toys with the audience as to what already know and expect from horror movies.
That is where "Scare Campaign" is really effective as it mixes things up with all different styles of horror from sudden shocks, ghostly figures as well as a sense of dread which comes from violent horror, the sort of thing where people get half their head sliced off thanks to men in freaky masks. But I can't reveal any specifics of the horrors and how people meet their gruesome deaths as the whole movie works on the reveals, the gruesomeness of it and of course the twists.
What this all boils down to is that "Scare Campaign" ends up a much more effective and entertaining horror than I was expecting with a nice mix of horror styles and twists to make you question what is what. The one negative I have is how the whole thing ends!
