Kicking off the Halloween season, Shudder dropped a brand new exclusive film with the horror-comedy ‘Scare Me’ starring Aya Cash and Josh Ruben, who also directed the film. The movie is currently streaming exclusively on Shudder.
“During a power outage, two strangers tell scary stories. The more Fred and Fanny commit to their tales, the more the stories come to life in their Catskills cabin. The horrors of reality manifest when Fred confronts his ultimate fear.”
The film follows the run-down and defeated Fred, who is taking a vacation up in a remote cabin during the winter, to work on his werewolf epic that he hopes will provide him a way out of his mundane job in advertising.
While it promises seclusion, Fred quickly runs into successful author Fanny, who is also working on some of her new ideas. Her pushy, sarcastic, and bold personality provided a nice contrast from the inward, unsure, and lack-of-confidence character that Fred is.
The two hole up in Fred’s cabin once a storm knocks the power out, and that’s where Fanny hatches the idea that the two tell one another horror stories to pass the time.
Where Fanny excels, Fred falters, at times, and Franny points out all the flaws in his approach, and the meat-and-potatoes of his stories.
The two are joined, briefly, by pizza delivery man Carlo (Chris Redd) who is a big fan of both horror, and Fanny. As stories continue to pass along and the night grows longer, the movie lulls you to sleep with it’s lack of….anything.
Scare Me isn’t a bad movie, but it isn’t anything good either. Aside from fleeting moments of tension towards the end, the movie lacks a pulse. The stories, and the characters re-enacting them, don’t hold the entertainment value for long, and this becomes a boring, campside fire story-telling session that just exists.
While Cash and Ruben are great in the their roles, and Redd’s appearance brought some much needed energy, Scare Me is nothing special, noting memorable, and, at it’s highest point, just a watchable film.
