SCARED SHITLESS (2024)

New streaming on Tubi from Blue Fox Entertainment!
Directed by Vivieno Caldinelli.
Written by Brandon Cohen.
Check out the
trailer here!

Don (Steven Ogg) is a plumber eager to teach his son, Sonny (WALKING DEAD’s Daniel Doheny), the tricks of the trade. The problem is Sonny is deathly afraid of germs. And in a profession that dives headfirst into the grossest tasks, this is not a good phobia to have. Building Manager Patricia (Chelsea Clark) used to go to school with Sonny and has been having issues with the building’s plumbing, so he calls Don and Son to help. Meanwhile, a mysterious professor (KIDS IN THE HALL’s Mark McKinney) has snuck a biological creature from his lab into the building and it’s escaped into the building’s pipes. Things are about to get grody!

SCARED SHITLESS is a fun little gorefest. I know some people draw the line with potty humor and try to make it infantile, which it is. Still as Danny DeVito said, “Poop is funny.” And this movie wallows in it.

A lot of what works with SCARED SHITLESS is that it still manages to be charming and maintain a nugget of sincerity amidst all that sewage. Steven Ogg is a talented everyman. After his stint on THE WALKING DEAD, I was afraid he would be typecast as the sleazy villain. But after he played a heroic lead role in DARK MATCH, I was glad to see the actor get some bigger, meatier, and heroic roles. Here he is genuinely great as Don, a father tickled pink that his son is following in his footsteps as a plumber. Ogg shows great comic timing and even works in some dramatic moments too. While they are not as powerful in the acting department, Daniel Doheny and Chelsea Clark are believable and charming as former classmates, meeting later in life and feeling an attraction for one another.

The ongoing joke that Sonny is deathly afraid of germs is exploited to the extreme here. All kinds of gross and strange fluids are flung in his direction, and I found myself laughing and laughing again at the repetitive use of this as a throughway for the film. This stuff is gross and Sonny is the audience’s normal reaction to this kind of stuff, whereas Don and Patricia are more jaded to the mess.

The monster design works in a DEADLY SPAWN sort of way. It seems to be a nice mix of practical and CG effects, and it works marvelously. In top of that, there’s a lot of blood and other grossness spattered about, so if you’re a germaphobe like ol’ Sonny, this movie will give you a lot to ick to.

Still, I believe there’s a bit of a leap in logic or a plot hole or something up here. The monster is in the building’s plumbing, and I get it that a building has interconnected pipes. But does that mean that the whole building isn’t connected to the other buildings on either side of it? Maybe someone out there is a plumber and can clue me in on this. But in SCARED SHITLESS, for some reason, the monster makes its way through the pipes, but it all seems to come together into one pipe on the basement. Yes, this makes it easy for the plumbers to take on the monster in the final act, but for some reason, I don’t think plumbing works that way. Again, maybe I’m wrong. But that doesn’t make sense to me.

SCARED SHITLESS is reminiscent of TREMORS, not only because both feature worm-like monsters, but also because it is a story told from the perspective of the working man. And while I enjoy the elevated horror as much as the next guy, sometimes a movie that rolls up its sleeves and just dives into the shit is a refreshing watch. That’s what SCARED SHITLESS is. A working man’s creature-feature and there just aren’t enough of those these days.