Review Double Feature: Scare Package (2019) and The Mortuary Collection (2019)

Leave it to Popcorn Frights to mine some good out of the pandemic by bringing back the drive-in double feature. They screened both of these anthology horror movies at a pop-up drive-in theater in Fort Lauderdale's hipster neighborhood, and the experience, at least, was worth it.

But how were the movies themselves?

Scare Package (2019)

Not rated

Score: 2 out of 5

Well, this was disappointing. In fact, I wouldn't hesitate to call it an outright bad film. The subject matter seemed cool enough, a horror anthology specifically devoted to horror-comedy; while the genre is hard to get right, seeing several different directors each offer their own takes would've at least made for an interesting experience. And for the first hour or so, it did, as the segments ranged from so-so but watchable at worst to genuinely entertaining at best, with a creative opener putting me in the mood for a good film to come. Unfortunately, it's tied together by a framing device that's not only the least interesting thing about the film, but takes over the entire film during the third act and makes up the subject of the final "segment", a half-baked retread of The Cabin in the Woods that completely misses everything that worked so well about that film and mistakes a torrent of references to horror movies and tropes for actual satire or even parody of the genre. It's a film that I can only recommend to fans of the directors who contributed to it, and even then, I'd recommend you turn it off about an hour in.

The setup for the film revolves loosely around Rad Chad's Horror Emporium, a retro video store where the owner Chad is training a new employee, a young man named Hawn, while turning away a very weird guy who desperately wants a job there. The various segments of this anthology are the assorted films that Chad screens on the TV in his video store, each one offering a comedic twist on various horror tropes. All the while, Hawn starts to grow suspicious of the mysterious room in the back of the video store that Chad emphatically orders him not to go into, and starts to wonder about his mental state.

The various segments were the heart and soul of this film. The intro, Emily Hagins' "Cold Open", was one of the most amusing. While it unfortunately sets up the third-act twist that ruined the film, the basic concept, that of a guy who works to lead people into various horror movie scenarios, was amusing enough on its own, and I liked what the film did with it as it had this guy messing up at his job and becoming far more central to the "babysitter slasher" story he's involved with. It was a workplace comedy that could've been set in the universe of The Cabin in the Woods, and it could've set the stage for a better movie to come. The next segment, Chris McInroy's "One Time in the Woods", was unfortunately one of the weakest. While I give it credit for having some of the ickiest effects work in the film, it seemed to mistake volume for comedy, and its mashup of a slasher and a monster movie felt like a series of "lol random" humor more than anything. Noah Segan's "M.I.S.T.E.R." had the most interesting premise, a "men's rights" group with a Tyler Durden-esque leader who turn out to be werewolves, that could've gone in some interesting directions, especially in how it juxtaposed the idea of men embracing their "primal urges" with the werewolf myth. Unfortunately, despite a promising start, it didn't really do much with its premise, and while it did serve up a cool shootout where the hero guns down a bunch of werewolves on a football field, the ending made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Courtney and Hillary Andujar's "Girls' Night Out of Body" is about three young women being cursed by a shop owner to transform into pumpkinhead monsters after shoplifting from her store, and it was one of the weakest segments, never really going anywhere or obeying much in the way of any logic behind the characters' decisions. That said, it was pretty amusing, especially with the ending showing that the girls aren't exactly traumatized by their transformation. Anthony Cousins' "The Night He Came Back Again! Part IV: The Final Kill" was my personal favorite, a parody of slasher franchises where the killer always comes back for the next film, and a group of teenage campers setting out to capture him and figure out how to finally kill him. Not only are the lengths they go to to kill this guy constantly escalating, so does the manner in which he comes back and offs them one by one every time they think they got him. Baron Vaughn's "So Much to Do" was built around one joke (and had a weird cult subplot that felt extraneous), but that joke -- that a woman who's been body-snatched finally snaps and fights to take back her body when the man who's taken her over sits down to watch a show she hasn't caught up on, spoiling it for her -- was funny on the face of it and served as the hook for a "battle in the center of the mind" where the two are fighting over the TV remote.

For much of the first hour, I was able to groove to this movie. While the segments were hit-or-miss, even at their worst I was never bored. It was when the anthology section of the film ended and it switched gears in the third act that the film completely lost me. It turns out that Hawn was working for the same group that the protagonist of "Cold Open" did, and kidnaps Chad because he would make a perfect "movie geek" character in the slasher they're setting up. And while Hagins' "Cold Open" was actually funny, the third act here undoes all of the plot developments of the framing device before it -- Chad being a weirdo, everything to do with the guy stalking him -- in favor of a compressed, low-budget remake of The Cabin in the Woods (complete with lifting specific plot points and character details) with only a tenth of the wit or heart. Throughout this final part, the film mistook references to classic B-grade horror films for humor, from a recreation of the ending of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter to discussions of various tropes like the "final girl" and the relationship between the jock and the cheerleader that have been done to death in other "meta" horror-comedies. There were a few bits that worked, such as security being negligent because they're busy discussing Game of Thrones and an extended cameo by the famed horror host Joe Bob Briggs as himself in which he spends most of his time mocking Chad (who's too blinded by fanboy affection to realize it), but they were few and far between and were often gone all too soon. If I'm being perfectly honest, the third act felt barely one step above a Seltzer & Friedberg spoof movie from the 2000s; while the jokes here all at least had something to do with horror movies instead of being a grab-bag of pop culture, it still had the same problem of assuming that audiences recognizing a convention of the genre would mean that they think it's funny.

The Bottom Line

The first hour is pretty good and hits a number of high notes, but the third act drives this film into a ditch that it never pulls itself out of. You can tell that there was a lot of passion here even at its worst, but that didn't translate to a good movie. Save your time and money and watch Scary Movie again.

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The second movie of the night, fortunately, more than made up for the first one.

The Mortuary Collection (2019)

Not rated

Score: 5 out of 5

Now this? This made my night in the best possible way. A mix of retro flair, gothic camp, and some legitimately creepy and memorable stories, The Mortuary Collection is a remarkably well-made horror anthology that wears its Tales from the Crypt influence on its sleeve but isn't content to rest on its laurels and half-heartedly copy its inspirations. It's got moody atmosphere to spare without taking itself too seriously, it takes its twisted ideas and brings them to vivid life, and it's all tied together by Clancy Brown, one of the all-time great "hey, it's that guy!" actors, as the off-putting mortician telling us these stories. This is one that I expect to have a long life as one of the better examples of this type of film that I've seen.

The glue holding the film together is Sam, a young woman in the vaguely New England-ish town of Raven's End who's looking for work and walks into the local mortuary upon seeing a "Help Wanted" sign. The film's structure is that of the elderly mortician Montgomery Dark showing Sam around his mortuary in order to prepare her for the kind of work she'll be doing, telling her various creepy tales about the people who wound up dead on his slabs long before they turned old. In contrast to Scare Package, I loved this setup. Brown does a great job as Montgomery, conveying a character who's weird and gothic but not actively malicious, at least not unless you've done something wrong, and whose job has given him plenty of insight on people's various vices and virtues. Caitlin Custer anchored the other end of this framing device as Sam, the plucky, strong-headed young woman who's looking to work for Montgomery and turns out to be much more than just the naive ingenue one might assume her to be at first glance, ably conveying two very different sides of her character as we learn more about her.

From there, we get to the four anthology segments on display. The first, about a woman being eaten by a Lovecraftian monster hiding behind a bathroom mirror, is a simple but effective palate cleanser before the real mayhem starts, with a tale set on a vaguely '60s-ish college campus concerning a meatheaded frat boy. I had a great time with this one, a timely satire of both campus rape and privileged people who try to attach themselves to progressive social movements without actually understanding what those movements are fighting for. In this case, our protagonist Jake tries to tell a group of impressionable young women that free love (with him, he strongly implies but never overtly states) is the feminist thing to do while quoting Karl Marx to that effect. Unfortunately for him, the woman who takes him up on that offer is... biologically different, and after he takes off his condom during sex without her knowledge, he discovers the hard way why she was so insistent he wear one: namely, her unique biology winds up implanting her egg inside him, turning him into exactly the sort of sexual conquest that he brags about to all his buddies in the fraternity. It's here where the Tales from the Crypt influence is strongest, combining a morality play (in this case a feminist one) with grotesque body horror that goes exactly where you'd expect a "male pregnancy" horror story to go, culminating in a birth scene that I'm not liable to forget any time soon. (How does the baby leave Jake's body? The way it went in, silly. Draw your own conclusions.)

The third story, about a man whose wife has fallen terminally ill, is fairly predictable once you spot the influence of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", but it's still a very well-told homage to a classic horror story, filled with psychological horror to spare as the protagonist Wendell slowly goes mad at both the pressure of caring for his dying wife Carol and, later, his efforts to finally get her out of his life. The fourth and final story turns out to concern Sam directly, as she tells it to Montgomery after listening to his stories. It's actually one I'd seen before, the director having released it back in 2015 as a short film called The Babysitter Murders, and while me realizing that I'd seen it before allowed me to figure out the twist for both that segment and the film as a whole, I can't deny that it's still a very effective twist on a classic slasher formula (the Halloween plot of a killer stalking babysitters), one that, in hindsight, lays out all the clues as to what's really going on right at the start but hides them behind a formulaic structure such that you can't see them coming until it's too late. This one, too, culminates in an immensely satisfying Crypt-style moral lesson, as somebody who thought that they could keep getting away with their escalating crimes suddenly sees their luck run out in a fairly poetic way.

All of it is tied together with a vintage aesthetic that places the film no earlier than the 1980s but feels like it could take place in the '50s or '60s, combining the influences of multiple decades of classic horror movies under its umbrella. The mortuary setting was rich in atmosphere, a place where death was just a part of the job description, the place being a creepy old manor being just one nice touch out of many -- even if it isn't apparent until the end just how creepy the place is. The various segments each lay on different shades of the aesthetic that serves as the film's connective tissue, making a university, an apartment, and a suburban home all feel like they're in the same town while still making them feel distinct in the various influences they draw on. Owing to a low budget, they must have known that the CGI couldn't reach for realism, so instead, they went for stylization, the various monsters encountered looking like they came out of the pages of a comic or a storybook. And the quality acting isn't limited to Brown and Custer; the entire cast all knock it out of the park.

The Bottom Line

I don't really have much to fault this movie on. The production values were outstanding all around, the stories were all either unique and original or fun homages to classics, the style was a throwback in more ways than one, and the cast sold the hell out of it. I give it my highest recommendation for any horror fan.