Trick ‘r Treat – The Geekscape Review
Trick ‘r Treat is the best Halloween movie that you probably won’t get to see this year. Originally set to be released last October, then postponed to this October, and then finally postponed indefinitely, I had the good fortune of seeing this movie at a special screening arranged for fans by Moriarty of Aint It Cool News at the Mann’s Chinese Theater. Apparently, the amount of people who signed up for this screening was so overwhelming that they had to spread the movie across three screens just to accommodate everyone. If this doesn’t prove to the good people at Warner Brothers that there is indeed an eager audience for this film, I don’t know what will.
When I first saw the trailer for this movie back in the spring of 2007, all I could think was “this movie was made just for me”. Halloween is by far my favorite holiday, and the time leading up to Halloween is my favorite time of year. For one month, the entire country allows itself to celebrate the things that I love. I can go to the grocery store and see copies of A Nightmare on Elm Street or The Omen on endcaps, meant to be impulse buys instead of the usual Disney flicks. Cable stations seem to program their schedules for the month around Halloween themed programming. And for at least one night, excessive and often wonderfully tasteless theatricality is encouraged instead of being frowned upon. Halloween is in many ways the most American holiday, because it celebrates all of the things we are supposed to be against as a “Christian Nation”, but all secretly really love (well, not so secretly if you’re me). It captures our own cultural hypocrisy in a unique and wonderful way.
It’s clear that writer/director Mike Dougherty (co-writer of X-Men 2 and Superman Returns) loves Halloween even more than I ever could, and Trick ‘r Treat is a big heart felt love letter to not just the holiday, but to a type of horror movies that they just don’t make anymore. This is an anthology horror film, much like Creepshow and Twilight Zone: The Movie, but I actually think this movie is a much better one overall than those. It has wonderful homages to those films as well as other classic horrors, without ever being obvious about it or feeling like a rip off of those originals. Nowhere near as extreme as the Hostel style torture flicks, but still creepy enough to be scary, this movie is kinda like Goosebumps, only with the occasional decapited head.
Set in a small Ohio town (all good horror flicks should be set in small midwestern towns… it worked out great for Michael and Freddy!) the film follows four separate stories, each set on Halloween night and loosely connected to each other, Pulp Fiction style. According to Dougherty, each story represents what Halloween means at different stages of your life; first as a kid, when it’s all about getting candy, then as a teenager/young adult, when it’s all about the partying, then as a parent, when it’s all about passing on the traditions to your children, and finally, as the grouchy old person who hates the holiday and just wishes the kids would stop ringing the doorbell. Each of these stories work really well, and each has their own unique twist to it that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling for you, assuming this movie ever gets released and you get a chance to see if for yourselves.
The movie really has a beautiful look to it as well. Apparently made for only $12 million, this movie looks like it cost at least double that in my opinion, a testament to everyone involved. It has that kind of overly perfect, manicured holiday look, the kind that only really ever exists in the movies, but not as extreme or stylized as a Tim Burton film for example. And kudos to the makers of this film for using all practical effects in this move. I’m not one of those people who hates CGI, but CGI in horror movies just about never works. To be truly scared, you gotta believe that you’re seeing something that’s actually there and not just pixels.
The cast here is really terrific, and filled with genre favorites, like Anna Paquin from the X-Men series, Tamoh Penickett from Battlestar Galactica, Dylan Baker from the Spider-Man flicks (in an eerily similar performance to the one he gave in Todd Solondz’ Happiness) and Brian Cox, who of course has been in every movie made in the past ten years. If I have any complaint, it’s that I wish I the movie was a bit longer, as it could have used just one more story in my opinion. I guess that might be seen as too much of a good thing in the end.
I’m not really sure what Warner Brother’s issue with this movie really is or why they are afraid of releasing it. At first it was suggested that they merely didn’t want to compete with the Saw movies, first part IV and now part V. Then I heard it simply was because this wasn’t a remake, a sequel, or torture porn, and therefore they didn’t know how to market it. Now having seen it, I think it probably has something to do with the unusually high body count of little kids in this movie. Stuff like dead little kids makes studios really nervous in these overly sensitive times, although they should know better than anyone that bad publicity is still publicity. Besides, as Dougherty pointed out in the Q&A after the movie, we once saw a little kid get eaten by a shark in Jaws, a possesed little girl masturbate with a crucifix in The Exorcist, and two little girls get hacked to bits in The Shining. And we all survived. When did we all turn into such pussies?
Whatever happens to Trick ‘r Treat in regards to it’s theatrical distribution, it will eventually have a long shelf life on DVD and become a Halloween night staple on television along with John Carpenter’s Halloween, The Nightmare Before Christmas and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. But I still really think this movie deserves theatrical distribution of some sort and it would be a damn shame if it never receives it. Right now you can go on Amazon.com and order a beautiful coffee table book based on the movie, as well as order some lovely figures from Sideshow toys. But you can’t see the actual movie, and as far as I’m concerned that’s just ridiculous. I can only hope that by this time next year we can all talk about this movie and what a great little gem it is and not about how shitty it is that it has yet to be released.
