Day 30

Scare Campaign (2016)

Directed by Cameron Cairnes & Colin Cairnes

When an Australian horror-themed reality show, think Scare Tactics, needs a new surge of viewers to convince the network executive to renew their show for another season, they plan their most over the top setup yet, a fake job interview set up at an abandoned mental hospital. Unfortunately, things end up getting much too real when someone unexpectedly dies on set, and everyone has to deal with the raised stakes. Scare Campaign is a movie we’re kind of split on. It does a lot of things right, particularly the setup, which is fun, creative, and leads to a ton of great character moments where the actors are given a chance to flex their acting muscles. Also, when the slasher bits start the gore is mostly pretty decent. For me, the problems for this movie start when it tries to be twisty, and it is the usual problem that arises where the twist isn’t as good as the writers think it is, and also it leads to a series of predictable plot points.

Part of the problem is that I really liked the initial setup of Scare Campaign. The first twist is good, and if that had been the only major plot development I would have been completely happy with the story. Unfortunately, Scare Campaign dips its toes into a series of tropes that really frustrate me. It would be spoilers to say exactly what these tropes are because they are kind of twists, but suffice to say I find the particular tropes used to be lazy writing which don’t come across as scary as they are intended to be, just kind of an excuse for things to happen. Not everyone will agree with me on this though, and even if the second half let us down a bit, we really enjoyed the first half of the film and would tentatively recommend it if you’re into comedy-horror and slashers. You might get more out of it than we did.