Prime Time: Scare Me (2020)

It's not exactly a hard and fast rule, and some of the exceptions are truly memorable, but I have often been struck by the fact that terrible horror movies often thrown some gratuitous nudity and/or violence at you within the first few minutes. It's an easy way to get the attention of any young male viewer who may have picked a title without really knowing what he was letting himself in for.

I wasn't really sure what I was letting myself in for when I hit play on Scare Me. There's also another film this year with the same title, which I have now discovered seems like it could be a smarter and more fun horror flick. All I knew was that it was a horror anthology, so I figured I should find something to enjoy. And then it happened within the first three minutes. Tits. Tits happened. It did not bode well.

And yet I still held out hope. I'm a sucker for an anthology horror movie, and even the weaker ones tend to have some fun tales in them. I could recap the selection, and highlight some of my favourites. Unfortunately, that's not possible. Scare Me somehow manages to be one of the worst films of this type that I have seen in some time.

I would love to tell you the various stories that are told here, and the way elements weave in and out of the framing narrative, but it was hard to care about any one part of Scare Me. None of the characters are people you want to spend any time with, none of the main stories are that memorable, and none of the blurring of reality and fiction pays off in a satisfying manner.

Directed by Conrad Glover and Mark Stephens, with the latter also sharing the writing credit with Thomas Fisco, this is a mess from start to finish. It seems as if the creative talent behind the camera think they're making something witty and clever, which couldn't be further from the truth. Even the moments that have the tellers of the tales (oh yeah, the very basic summary of the plot is some folks sharing scary stories around a campfire) either commenting knowingly on their own familiar story, or being interrupted by someone who knows what is coming, are just tiresome.

The cast cannot do anything to overcome the massive problem of the script, and none of them are good enough to even provide a small respite from the weaker elements of the film. I'm not even going to mention them, because that would imply that I kept track of who was who, when the reality was more like everyone blurring into one distinctly average cast. One or two do better, one or two do a lot worse, so things even out to an absolute halfway point on the range that charts overwhelming averageness.

No decent reworking of familiar premises, no decent twists. In fact, the only surprise to be found here is the fact that this isn't actually the debut feature of the film-makers.

There won't be too many links here any more, except my kofi link (if you ever want to "buy me a coffee").

2/10