Rich Reviews is back with a special Halloween Edition. I recently saw the direct-to-DVD film Trick ‘r Treat. It stars Dylan Baker (Dr. Connors in the Spidermans) and Anna Paquin (True Blood and X-Men). First, a little back story. The movie was made back in 2007 and scheduled for a Halloween release. However, Saw IV was opening the same time, from a different production company and they feared getting smoked at the Box Office.
The idea then became to move it to an October 2008 release, but that also didn’t happen. Much of the production team on Trick ‘r Treat, including producer Bryan Singer, who directed Superman Returns worked on the Man of Steel sequel, which was a failure. This may have been another reason that Warner Bros. decided to avoid a wide release, or a theatrical release all together.
So you may have been as surprised as me to see previews on TV for Trick ‘r Treat this month and have the commercial end with “Now Available on DVD.” I had never heard of it, it had a couple major movie stars, and they seem to release a lot of horror movie junk, so what was the deal? I did 2 minutes of research and that’s what I found.
As for the film itself, Baker plays a single dad who is a high school principal and a… serial killer. Paquin plays a college student virgin, there’s some kids who play a horrible prank, a young couple, a weird old man who lives alone (Brian Cox), and this little creep kid/man that seems to be everywhere (pictured above). Instead of focusing on just 1 story they bounce around to about 5 and try to have them overlap when they can with characters from other stories in the background here and there.
There are some good ideas within the stories, but for the most part it just doesn’t work. I was confused at parts, and it seemed to either over explain certain things or completely under explain them.
Best part? The run time, only 82 minutes. That’s like a long episode of The Wire, expect no where near as good. There were some really good death scenes… and I’m still talking about The Wire.
Trick ‘r Treat did bring some uniqueness which is very rare for horror, and since it was less than an hour and a half, I’m not pissed off that I sat through it. Ultimately they did make the right decision by not putting it in theatres. It’s not worth that, probably not worth renting (can you still rent movies?), I did Netflix it, but you might not want to take up the top spot in the queue with it. If it comes on TV next Halloween and you have nothing to do, I mean nothing, there’s no MLB playoffs, NFL, college football, NBA opening week, etc., then feel free to give it a watch and let me know what you think.
In the end Trick ‘r Treat was a lot more Trick than Treat.
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