Scare Zone utilizes our country’s fascination and love of strip mall haunted houses. Every Halloween, we see more and more of them popping up, and with them, long lines of thrill-seekers looking to test their wits against the horror inside. The story centers on a new group of people readying one of these mazes for the yearly Halloween crowds. Of course, nothing goes as planned, and people start turning up dead in the maze. 

The idea and setting for the story make Scare Zone an intriguing prospect at first. A group of people getting picked off in grizzly ways by an unknown slasher inside a labyrinth designed specifically to invoke fear seems like a can’t miss idea. The execution of the idea, however, leaves much to be desired. The biggest issue here is that the cast is fairly expansive, to the point where we as an audience don’t know who to latch on to. Because there are so many characters to service, it’s not immediately clear who we should be latching on to.

Instead of giving us any sort of character depth or relationships, there are various montages set to mid-2000s rock songs to try and glaze over the fact that there is no camaraderie amongst the new group of workers. When people do start getting picked off, it’s difficult to decipher who the person was and why we should really care. Essentially, the characters are just meat for the grinder. Giving the audience something, anything really, to grasp would have helped the story tremendously. As it stands, when someone dies, the lone reaction is most likely just an indifferent shrug.

There isn’t much scary or new here. The kills and jumps are things we’ve seen quite a few times before. The old “someone is dying at a haunted house but everybody thinks it’s part of the show” shtick comes out. The character shortcomings could have been overlooked if the thrills had been a little more exciting. Instead, it’s the typical stabbing here and the loss of limb there. The haunted house setting, with some fun details and flourishes, is never utilized to help ratchet up the tension or terror. The camera occasionally lingers on a severed head on a shelf, but that is the extent to which the setting is used. Finding ways to better employ the haunted house would have made the movie a more interesting watch; it would have made things far more unpredictable. 

There’s no one stand-out performance or set-piece. The story moves, people die, and the killer is eventually revealed. Scare Zone feels like a missed opportunity that would have benefited with a smaller cast, more attention to the characters and their relationships, and some decent set-pieces. Even a more interesting killer reveal and ending would have salvaged some goodwill. A large part of enjoying a horror movie is having someone to get invested in, someone who we care about’s survival. The glaring absence of this makes Scare Zone feel like a maze with only dead ends.

4 out of 10