A review of "Scary or Die"

Confessions of a Film Junkie: A review of “Scary or Die”

By: Brian Cotnoir

I’ve been noticing that there are more films like this appearing on Netflix.  This isn’t a film with one story, rather than it is a multiple short films linked together by a thin strand of plot to make one full length film.  There are a few decent ones I’ve seen. “Devils Carnival” is probably the best one I’ve seen (yes, I’m counting it because each character got their own individual story and song that was linked together by Lucifer telling 3 of Aesop’s Fables to the character Daniel).  There’s also “V/H/S/” and “The Theatre Bizarre”.  The film I’m reviewing this week is called “Scary or Die”.  The plot to the film is based off a mysterious stranger searching through videos on a website called Scaryordie.com where there are different stories and videos for a person to click on and learn a story.  One interesting thing about this film is some of the actors appear in more than one story, but it doesn’t affect the plot of the film as a whole; not even in the slightest bit.  Rather than talk about the film as a whole I’m just going to give a brief summary of each story and what I thought about it.  There will be Spoilers in this review because I particularly didn’t find any of them to be all that good.  If you want more reasons why just read the rest of this review.

The Crossing

     The First Story in “Scary or Die” is “The Crossing”.  It’s a story about two red necks, who live in Arizona, and their hoochie girlfriend.  Recently, the two rednecks have been abducting Mexican immigrants from all over the state, driving them out to the border and executing them to “send a message” to all other illegal immigrants who think about sneaking into the country.  One day after murdering and burying their two latest victims, one of them decides to add insult to injury by pissing all over the graves.  This for some reason or another leads to the Mexican immigrants coming back as zombies and they attack the rednecks and the hoochie girlfriend.  The zombies kill the rednecks, but the hoochie girlfriend manages to escape, but she is later shot by the Border Patrol when she is mistaken for zombie; implying that the Border Patrol was already aware of this zombie problem.  In my opinion this was the least awful of the stories in the film. It’s short, sweet, to the point, and the make-up effects are half-way decent.

Tae Jung’s Lament

     “Tae Jungs Lament” had the most predictable story in “Scary or Die”.  It’s the story about a mourning widower named Tae Jung who lives in Los Angeles, and he basically wanders around looking sad and mourning his late wife.  One day he witnesses a beautiful women being abducted by a stranger.  Rather than use commonsense and report the abduction to police like a sane person, he instead goes after the abductor and tosses his IPhone into the car and then tracks the IPhone’s location on his laptop (again not ONCE does he consider calling the police and telling them he witnessed an abduction and that he was able to secretly track where this guy was going.  Tae Jung eventually finds them, knocks at the abductor and saves the woman.  The woman’s named is Min-ah (ßDRACULA REFERENCE!) and she is so thankful for Tae Jung coming to rescue her, so she invites him over to give him a reward. Unfortunately for Tae Jung, the Min-Ah turns out to be a vampire and the guy who abducted her was actually a vampire slayer, so sucks to be Tae Jung.  If only he would’ve called the police and reported the incident instead, he could have avoided this whole silly little incident.

Re-Membered

     It’s “The Tel-Tale Heart”, but instead of a guy being buried under the house and the person thinking they can hear the victims heart beat, it’s a dismembered body in the trunk of the car and the driver thinks he hears a person knocking on the trunk.  It’s boring and it’s unoriginal.

Clowned

The Real reason we all checked it out.
He's on the Poster and the DVD Cover.

This is the longest story in “Scary or Die”, it’s about a man named Emmet, whose just trying to survive and take care of his mother and little brother.  The day of his little brother’s birthday party, he is attacked and bitten on the leg by “Fucko the Clown”.  If being called “Fucko the Clown” wasn’t ridiculous enough, he also wears the exact same costume and make-up that American serial killer John Wayne Gacy wore; No freaking subtlety whatsoever!  It’s clear as day that this clown was meant to look just like John Wayne Gacy!  The clowns bite begins to take an effect on Emmet and he slowly begins to turn into a “Were-Clown”???  I don’t f*cking know! This film story makes no sense and it’s kind of all over the place.  Anyway Emmet tries to find the Clown that bit him so he can protect his brother, but the longer Emmet stays a clown the more psychotic he becomes and yearns to eat other peoples flesh.  He eventually saves his little brother Andy from being killed and eaten by Fucko the Clown, but then Emmet decides he can no longer go on living for fear that he might harm his little brother or another child. So he hangs out around a play ground the police show up, he pulls out a fake gun and the police kill him.                  

That is some Wicked Make-Up :)

Make’s no God d@mn sense, huh?  This story tries to condense and force out way too much material in a short span.  I will say this though; Emmet does turn into a pretty gnarly clown with this permanent evil grin on his face.  Even in the scenes where he’s sad and crying he still has that evil smile on his face and it just looks cool.  That unfortunately is the only positive thing I have to say about this part of the film.  It was a stupid idea and it was poorly executed. 

Lover Come Back

Spoiler alert: Her character is the framing device!

The last story in “Scary or Die” is also the shortest and the Worst part of the film.  A woman is beaten to death by her abusive husband, her grandfather was a Voodoo Priest or Witch Doctor or I don’t give a crap, and anyways he cast a spell on her as a child so she has the ability come back from the dead so she does and she finds her ex-husband and kills him. The End!