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Scare Antics is one of these crappy TV-shows where innocent
people are scared shitless (and way beyond what's in good taste) just to
entertain the audiences. It's also fighting for survival in an overly
crowded market, which means while producer/host David (Todd Bruno) cuts
corners wherever he can (including cast-and-crew safety) to keep the
budgets down, the pranks are getting more and more outrageous and
dangerous. This time around, the Scare Antics team has teamed up
with a trio of teens (Gema Calero, Reggie Peters, Daniela Larez), who want
to lure their sort-of friend, weirdo Jacob (Norbert Velez) into an
abandoned and supposedly haunted chemical plant ... where in a macabre
twist, Jacob's father has died in a decade or so ago. The Scare
Antics crew sets up its cruel but lame prank, and while David still
thinks they are onto something good, his co-producer and sort-of
girlfriend Brenda (Aniela McGuinness) already has a weird feeling about
it, in equal parts fueled by guilt and safety concerns. Of course, the
prank backfires: Jacob finds a biohazard suite like the one his father
died in and puts it on, which puts him in a different state of mind, he
finds an axe, and when the Scare Antics-monster actor attacks him
in a similar suit, Jacob simply hacks him to pieces - and when he finds
out the whole thing was a set-up by his friends, he kills them as well,
only Melanie (Gema Calero) somehow manages to escape and make it to the Scare
Antics crew - which far from saves her, because they have locked
themselves inside an office at the center of the plant with only one exit,
they're unarmed, without communication to the outside, not even an idea of
the lay-out of the place. On the other side of the office door though,
Jacob is waiting, and he has been here so often as a child he knows the
plant like the back of his hand. And he's armed - and very very very angry
at pretty much everyone hiding in the office. Oh, and he definitely
doesn't shy back from murder ... At heart this might be a
slasher movie (as above synopsis probably suggests), but it works way
better than most out there because it gives the central plot a solid and
complex backstory for a change (a genre-anomaly in itself) without ever
losing sight of its main plot, its central characters are actually
fleshed-out rather than just getting (clearly visible) numbers to tell
everybody when they're going to go to the slaughter, and amidst all this,
the direction is incredibly tight with a view of how to build up and keep
tension and when to insert its (few but effective) gore effects. Oh, and
the whole thing makes effective use of its limited sets, too, using the
limitations to its advantage. Recommended, actually!
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