"You've gotta be fucking kidding me," Brian Cox gasps towards the end of this movie. Lemme tell you, he said a mouthful. How can a movie that looks this fucking great - this is one of the absolute best looking and well shot horror movies I've seen in a long time - wind up being so mediocre? It certainly wasn't for lack of talent - besides the estimable Mr. Cox, we've got Dylan Baker (the pederast family man from Happiness) and Anna Paquin (True Blood, X-Men) holding down the main roles in two of the other segments in this Halloween-themed anthology. We even have the amazing Brett "Shit Happens When You Party Naked" Kelly (Bad Santa) around for what, by all intents and purposes, should have been an orange plastic pumpkin full of sticky-sweet goodies but winds up being a bit of a mixed bag.Trick'r Treat is a horror anthology with all of the stories interconnected and taking place on a single Halloween night in the town of Warren Valley, Ohio. This town has such a Halloween blow-out that I wanna move there - even if it is in Ohio. And even if the local school principal is a serial killer that hands out poisoned candy to trick-or-treaters. And even if the bus driver for the special-needs school will take a bribe to drive a bus full of kids over a cliff at the behest of their parents. And even if...well, you're starting to get the picture.
Good actors, good looking, good premise, good god - what the hell can be wrong with such a thing? Well, truth be told, most of it plays out like the more lackluster Simpsons "Tree House of Horror" vignettes, the ones you always use as an excuse to take a piss and grab another brew. There's even a part where three trick-or-treaters knock on the door of a party being hosted by a shit-faced teacher that has to be based directly on Edna Krabappel. It's all there - the looks, the mannerisms, the rap she lays on the kids about coming in for a drink. I'm sure that all looked good on paper, it's just too bad that live-action homages to cartoons don't work all that well, even if the boy trick-or-treater can get away with uttering lines Bart Simpson will never be able to ("I don't even know what that was. Coach Taylor was in a hot-dog costume butt-fucking a pig...I think," he says as they leave the teacher's front stoop).
For a movie that's seemingly trying to recapture the old EC twist-endings, there's very little that's actually surprising. We have the standard issue kids-play-prank-on-misfit-kid-that-backfires-like-ten-kinds-of-motherfucker, the upstanding-member-of-community-as-serial-killer riff, and the token makes-little-sense-but-we-gotta-do-a-supernatural-kind-of-thing-because-some-suckers-still-like-that-kind-of-garbage bit. And if you aren't able to see the end of the whole girl-losing-her-virginity story coming as soon as you see her Halloween costume...well then, maybe this movie's for you.
On the plus side, you've got four main segments and a wrap-around all crammed into a lean eighty or so minutes, a merciful running time that leaves you little room to get truly bored and put out with the whole affair. And again, it does look magnificent. It's still far from living up to the considerable hype placed upon it (this thing was supposed to be released to theaters back in 2007 or so, right?), so I'd suggest some beers and a late-night lights-out viewing to help set the appropriate vibe. It's worth a gander, especially since Halloween is right around the corner, but I really doubt you'll be re-watching it again any time outside of the holiday season. It's a passable once-a-year watch, and it'll probably go down a lot better with the younger set that's just now getting into horror flicks and maybe hasn't seen as many anthology movies of this stripe.
You could do worse than losing a buck or two on the rental, but I'd think twice before buying this thing sight unseen. The disc is pretty bare-bones but it does have an extra animated short that was kind of the seedling idea that eventually grew into this movie.
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