Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge

Why would anyone make a sequel? And how do you make one when just about every character died in the last movie? Well, Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge, the delightfully chaotic sequel to 2020's horror-comedy anthology side-splitter Scare Package, answers those questions in a twofold fashion. Firstly, because an anthology is all about tone, not continuity, so if the first one worked it's easy to make a follow-up. Secondly, because, like comics, no one important stays dead in horror.

Except Rad Chad (King), who was most definitely dead at the end of Scare Package, with a severed arm and a hole punched right through his head by the Devil's Lake Impaler. So the only way he could come back is through videotaped messages, and who else leaves videotaped messages? Jigsaw, from the Saw movies. So that's why everyone attending Chad's funeral suddenly finds themselves kidnapped, sealed in a room, and forced to solve a series of puzzle-based traps to survive.

That format cuts away to four shorts, one of which leans hard into the sequel vibe as Chelsey Grant returns as Daisy, the sister of the deranged killer from "The Night He Came Back Again! Part IV – The Final Kill," for the "The Night He Came Back Again! Part VI: The Night She Came Back," a comedic spin on Halloween H20: 20 Years Later that accepts how convoluted and absurd these franchises become after years of retcons and myth-building. With shades of Scream 2.

Scare Package II is more dedicated than the first film to deconstruction, as in the first segment, Alexandra Barreto's "Welcome to the 90s," a silly-smart look at what it would be like to be a classic Seventies final girl in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer world.

That all works well (although probably best for horror aficionados) and is a fun evolution for the franchise. Yet one step back is in the decision to pack in some more contemporary references. Some have already aged poorly (NFTs? the cinnamon challenge?), but some deliver surprisingly entertaining shocks, like Jed Shepherd reuniting with the cast of his pandemic Zoom smash Host for "Special Edition," a playfully dry swipe at the J-horror ghost-in-the-machine trope. It's very much of the moment, but that just means a certain immediacy, winding together diverse influences that make sense together. Rachele Wiggins pulls off that same alchemy with "We're So Dead," smooshing together Stand By Me, Stranger Things, The Fly, Re-Animator, and Pet Sematary in a way that doesn't just feel like an unwieldy stack of references.

When it comes to the segments, Scare Package II is much more successful than the first film in striking a unified tone – maybe less outrageously funny, maybe a little drier, but still entertaining. However, this time it's the wraparound that's uneven. Series creator Aaron B. Koontz overstuffs some sequences, layering Rec over Cube over The Blair Witch Project over A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors over Hellraiser in a single scene. Where the references felt like an in-joke in the original, here they just barely stay clear of being homework. Luckily, Koontz knows what to do with a very game cast, including newcomer and genre fixture Graham Skipper, the returning Byron Brown as annoying customer Sam, and most especially Zoe Graham, back as final girl Jessie. With the inevitable trilogy-topper set up in the cliffhanger ending, let's hope the third film is more The Exorcist III than Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth.

Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge is available on Blu-ray now.